Atomic Cube
(384 Card Cube)
Atomic Cube
Cube ID
Art by Ernanda SouzaArt by Ernanda Souza
384 Card Unpowered Cube47 followers
Designed by dinrovahorror
Owned
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“From a sea of infinite possibilities, our choices create the future.”
—Mu Yanling


Welcome to Atomic Cube, where the spells are small, powerful, and combine in lots of ways to make new and exciting things!

Atomic Cube is the place where I aim to cultivate the type of Magic I love most: High in player agency, and rewarding of skillful decisionmaking across draft, deckbuilding, and gameplay.


Gameplay Goals

First and foremost, I intend for this cube to be about fundamental Magic strategy. Concepts such as card advantage, combat math, and "the beatdown" are core to gameplay in this cube, and, in order to accentuate them, I have excluded many cube mainstays that circumvent them, such as reanimator, infinite combos, or similar strategies. I also strive to accentuate the mana system and reward mana efficiency, so you will find essentially no way of affecting the board for zero mana, such as pitch spells or free/mana positive ramp spells.

In bringing the basics to the forefront, strategic decisions are plentiful while also being meaningful towards the outcome of the game. A few more granular ways I create this type of gameplay are through a low curve (making sequencing decisions more relevant), the inclusion of cards that inherently come with decisions (hence the inclusion of shocklands and surveil lands over duals), the exclusion of cards that create game states where players don't have much control over the direction of the game (hexproof threats, stax pieces, etc), and a high density of interactive spells.

With this in mind, gameplay shakes out to be pretty similar to retail limited, while still featuring many of the high-impact cards that see play in formats like Modern and Legacy.


Draft Patterns

My love for interesting decisions naturally extends to the draft portion. To that end, one of the things I avoid most strongly in this cube are cards that are clear picks over essentially any other card, since I believe they can rob players of agency. Therefore, I have tried to generally scale the power level of cards with how narrow they are, be that in terms of color or in terms of viability across decks, in order to create tradeoff decisions between power and openness in the first few picks. I also seek to increase the density of effects that traditional wisdom tells us are high picks in retail limited (such as fixing and removal) in order to make the choice between various types of effects more meaningful. Additionally, the high fixing density in the form of, generally, lands that deal damage to you, in conjunction with the low curve and high speed of the cube, makes deciding how many colors to play meaningful. Finally, the card inclusions are such that most color combinations are able to play a wide variety of deck speeds.

All these factors come together to create a very high degree of mobility during the draft, allowing players to draft successfully across a wide spectrum of color combinations and deck speeds and making each pick impactful.


This cube began as a clone of @andymangold's Bun Magic Cube, and I owe a great deal of my expertise in cube design to him and to @anthonymattox through their podcast, Lucky Paper Radio.

This is a lot of swaps, so I'm going to try to talk broad design ethos rather than touching on absolutely everything:

I've cut all the burn spells that don't go face. Red has a ton of really cool removal spells that are inherently modal, and I want to see what it's like if Doom Blades are restricted to white and black. Additionally, I'm cutting the remaining two-color cycling lands, as I've been happy with the Tranquil Thicket cycle here and I'm also adding even more cyclers in this update. A few gold cards that feel too generic are going in favor of more focused ones, such as Prismari and Kolaghan's Commands for Slick Sequence and Alesha. Finally, Death-Greeter's Champion really has not been ending games in a way I find fun or satisfying, and I'm definitely jumping on the opportunity to reduce the count of busted red three-drops.

A few notable non-DFT adds: Tithe makes its triumphant return; I'm expecting it to be even better than when I originally played it now that surveils are in the mix. Bandage is a neat little cantrip that I think turns into a 2-for-1 relatively frequently here. Mishra's Research Desk is another cool cantrip/card advantage engine that gets fetched with Saga, to boot.

DFT Adds:

Defend the Rider, Grim Bauble, Intimidation Tactics, and Locust Spray are fairly known quantities right in line with similar cards in the cube. Voyager Glidecar reads a lot like what I wanted Warden of the Inner Sky to be able to do here, and I also kind of think raising the floor on a Vehicle from nothing to one mana Scry 1 is a lot more meaningful than it looks. The Last Ride looks really cool; I'm definitely happy for more Death's Shadows and the idea that a slower black deck might want this for the card advantage is pretty neat, too. Marauding Mako is the card I'm least sure about, given how powerful a lot of the other red one-drops are here, but the cycling makes it pretty low-risk for an aggro threat and the ceiling is pretty crazy, even in the late game.

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