Golden Gate Artifact Cube
(450 Card Cube)
Golden Gate Artifact Cube
Art by Franz VohwinkelArt by Franz Vohwinkel
450 Card Unpowered Legacy Cube153 followers
Designed by shaneswalker
Golden Gate Artifact Cube

The Artifact Cube is a high powered legacy cube centered around artifacts. Here are the goals for the cube:

  • Focus on synergy. The artifact cube contains fewer generically powerful cards, instead focusing on cards that enable powerful interactions centered around artifacts.
  • Avoid an "on rails" drafting experience. By focusing on synergy, a cube runs the risk of having an "on rails" drafting experience if too many of the cards are only good in one kind of deck. To avoid this the cube prioritizes themes that have broad overlap. Themes are also not confined to certain color combinations. This allows a wide variety of mixing and matching of themes, cards and colors in the cube. For example, it's possible to build a great sacrifice deck in almost any color combination featuring at least r or b.
  • Keep as high power level as possible. Part of the fun of the cube is doing some of the most busted things you can do in Magic. Even though the cube aims to keep a wide variety of synergies viable, it still prioritizes making them as powerful as possible.
  • Feature strategies from some of the top decks in Magic's history. The cube should allow you to explore old ideas in new ways, invoking nostalgia of some of the most powerful artifact-based cards and strategies in Magic's history.
Themes

As pointed out above, there's a lot of blending between the themes, but hopefully this will give you a high level taste of what's possible in the artifact cube.

Affinity

for artifacts


A classic strategy throughout Magic's history. Quickly deploy as many artifacts as you can to the board and use them to your advantage to activate metalcraft, pump up construct tokens, power out spells with improvise and affinity for artifacts, or animate them into huge creatures.

Artifact Aggro

aka artifact weenie


An aggressive slant on affinity. Power out as many artifact creatures as you can and buff them with cards like Tempered Steel or Cranial Plating. Finish your opponent off with powerful artifact based burn spells like Galvanic Blast.

Equipment

suit up

The cube is full of powerful equipment and ways to buff equipped creatures. You can take things in an aggressive direction by using an equipped threat to quickly kill your opponent. There's also you a midrange approach that supplies a never ending stream of creatures that can become game ending threats by suiting them up.

Subtheme: Colossus Hammer

The cube has several ways to equip for free, and as Modern players know, the best thing to equip for free is a Colossus Hammer.

+1/+1 Counters

gettem' chonky


There are lots of ways to have fun with +1/+1 counters in the cube. Create huge beaters with proliferate and cards like Hardened Scales. Ramp your mana with Rishkar, Peema Renegade or load up a Walking Ballista and unload the counters as direct damage.

This archetype can be built in a way that's centered around artifact creatures, many of which have modular. The g variations can be built barely using any artifacts at all.

Sacrifice

nom nom

Sacrifice artifacts and creatures for fun and profit. Pumping out tokens like treasures and food and using them as fodder for your engine is one way to do it. Another way is to load up on artifacts and creatures like Ichor Wellspring and Experimental Synthesizer that can be sacrificed for value.

Subtheme: Tokens!

I heard you like tokens, so have some tokens with your tokens. There are lots of tokens flying around in the cube, and a some cards to utilize them in interesting and powerful ways.

Reanimator

we can rebuild it

A classic archetype with an artifact twist. There are lots of big, powerful artifacts to quickly discard and reanimate to play. You can reanimate them the old fashioned way with b cards like Reanimate, or welder-style with r cards Goblin Welder and Trash for Treasure.

Subtheme: Discard

Huge artifacts to reanimate aren't the only cards you might want to discard. Discard Ovalchase Daredevil and continuously return them back to your hand. Use cards like Currency Converter to squeeze extra value out of your discarded cards.

Combos

the true test of awesomeness

There are a lot of combos in the cube. Combine them with existing strategies or create a focused deck for combo kills!

Thopter Sword

Assembling Thopter Foundry and Sword of the Meek allows you to generate a thopters and gain a life as many times as you want for 1 mana. If Urza is also in play, you can create infinite thopters and gain infinite life.

Zirdalith

Get infinite colorless mana by having Zirda in play along with either Grim Monolith or Basalt Monolith.

Krark-Clan Ironworks

Krark-Clan Ironworks is a particularly powerful sacrifice engine, and lets you power out big turns with the help of recursive cards like Scrap Trawler.

Artifact Storm

Krark-Clan Ironworks, Paradox Engine and Lion's Eye Diamond are all powerful mana generation engines. When combined with Recursion and Card Draw engines like Memory Jar, Underworld Breach, Bolas's Citadel you can probably find a way to bury your opponent.

Top Deck

Make Sensei's Divining Top less boring! Draw your whole deck when you have a cost reducer in play by repeatedly playing Sensei's Divining Top from the top for free.

Sam Cat

Infinitely drain your opponent by infinitely reanimating Cauldron Familiar with the help of Samwise Gamgee.

Counter Token Loops

There are lots of ways to generate infinite loops with Animation Module or Lonis, Genetics Expert. Try and assemble these as a powerful combo finish for your deck.

Animation Module + Altar + Counter Generator or Giver
Lonis, Genetics Expert + Altar + Counter Giver

Altars: Krark-Clan Ironworks, Ashnod's Altar, Phyrexian Altar, Crime Novelist + Sacrifice Engine

Counter Generators: Crime Novelist, Ravenous Squirrel, Korvold, Fae-Cursed King, Captain Storm, Cosmium Raider, Gleaming Geardrake, Syr Ginger, the Meal Ender, Securitron Squadron

Counter Givers: Yotian Dissident, Rosie Cotton of South Lane

Omissions

Life has been busy, and I'm a little late getting my Aetherdrift changes up. But here they are! It was a great set for the artifact cube, and I'm excited to see how they play out.

Here are some big themes in the change:

Artifact Matters

The artifact cube is getting even artifacty-er! The cube gets 9 more artifact cards with this change, along with more cards that benefit you for having more artifacts.

Break this Card

Are some of these adds good? I'm not sure, but they are definitely interesting and have a lot of potential. So it's up to you my faithful drafters to try to break them.

Additionally, some of the slower value cards in blue were replaced by Artifact Mage, Transit Mage, and Repurposing Bay to help you tutor up your synergy pieces.

Discard Matters

Aetherdrift printed some of the best discard payoffs in Magic. So that strategy got very juiced up in this change.

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