Welcome to our Mono Blue Cube!

This cube is truly Mono Blue – only basic Islands are available, and only Blue or colorless cards appear in the card pool (with some hybrid or Phyrexian mana exceptions).

In lieu of doing a full archetype write up, we’ve put together a few brief notes about the cube:

Why Blue?

Think of this cube as a love letter to the color Blue. You'll find all of the card draw, counterspells, and weird interactions Blue has to offer throughout Magic's history in here. Blue also provides incredible depth all in one color, so drafters will get to experience the archetype and gameplay diversity they’re used to in a multicolored cube.

Drafting philosophy

We designed this cube to present drafters with the maximum amount of choices for each pick. Every card you see in each pack is potentially playable, so you’ll be challenged to draft around a coherent strategy and build a cohesive deck. We hope this environment will allow you to experiment more throughout the draft compared to a multicolored environment, and you’ll have the chance to make some deckbuilding and sideboarding choices you might not otherwise be able to.

Where's the power?

We’ve excluded power from this cube to help keep picks interesting: a Mox Sapphire in a pack makes for a pretty uninspired first pick decision. While there are powerful cards, they require some building around to maximize their value, which we hope keeps picks thought-provoking.

Creatures

As you might expect, removal in a mono Blue cube is quite bad, and creatures correspondingly perform better than they might elsewhere. We suggest keeping this in mind as you draft – if you don’t intend to play many creatures, it’s a good idea to make sure you at least have a plan for dealing with them (though your plan can be to ignore them, of course).

Typal creature archetypes

In order to minimize easy draft lanes to hop into, we’ve excluded typal creature archetypes like Merfolk, Spirits, and Faeries from the cube. There are some typal synergies throughout, but you shouldn’t expect to be able to first pick a Lord of Atlantis and roll with drafting all the Merfolk you see.

Mana denial

Some amount of mana denial is included in this cube. We know mana denial can be a controversial mechanic for cubers, but we feel it enrichens this environment. The mana denial mechanic plays well with mana-taxing counterspells, which opens up a lot of drafting and deckbuilding choices. Some of the mana denial effects we’ve included are also from the early days of Magic, tapping into Blue’s legacy across Magic’s history.

What else?

Other than the above, we’d like to let drafters experience the cube for themselves and see where their drafting process takes them. You’ll likely recognize many of the iconic Blue archetypes from draft environments throughout the years, and this is a set of cards that can be combined in any amount of ways, so draft the cards you’ll have the most fun playing and see what you can do with them!