The Artifact Cube is a high powered legacy cube centered around artifacts. Here are the goals for the cube:
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.
for artifacts
aka artifact weenie
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.
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.
gettem' chonky
This archetype can be built in a way that's centered around artifact creatures, many of which have modular. The variations can be built barely using any artifacts at all.
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.
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.
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 cards like Reanimate, or welder-style with
cards Goblin Welder and Trash for Treasure.
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.
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!
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.
Get infinite colorless mana by having Zirda in play along with either Grim Monolith or Basalt Monolith.
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.
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.
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.
Infinitely drain your opponent by infinitely reanimating Cauldron Familiar with the help of Samwise Gamgee.
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
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 MattersThe 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 CardAre 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 MattersAetherdrift printed some of the best discard payoffs in Magic. So that strategy got very juiced up in this change.