B.O.N.G. Cube

BONG cube is my take on a high power, but power-less vintage cube. The BONG acronym is a play on the B.R.E.A.D. drafting acronym, however in this context it stands for Bombs, Oddballs, Near-misses, and Gamebreakers.

Drafting

It's often said that the best part of cube is drafting. This cube seeks to elevate the drafting experience into a complex puzzle to be solved. Abundant fixing by way of surveil lands and double of the fetch and shock lands, in addition to multiple micro packages within the macro 'archetypes', can muddy draft signals. There are some classic draft manipulation cards such as Cogwork Librarian, Lore Seeker, and Paliano, the High City. The density of powerful cards and difficult draft signals mean it's common to see vintage cube all stars like Forth Eorlingas!, Oko, Thief of Crowns, and others as late picks, inadvertently becoming trap cards for a greedy drafter.

Notes about card inclusion

Generally speaking, I enjoy complete card cycles. That said, there are a few key places where I have intentionally broken complete card cycles. There are certainly other cycles that are not complete in this cube, but those instances are more happenstance than anything else.

• The first being the pitch elemental cycle. After many iterations and testing, I've omitted Grief and Fury from the cube. I've found that the play patterns associated with these cards are too proactive, parasitic and generally un-fun. Additionally, many players coming from 60 card constructed have negative feelings associated with these cards that can impact their enjoyment of games facing against these cards, or make those players incorrectly evaluate them too highly during the draft.

• The second instance of intentional cycle breaking is in the surveil land cycle. I've swapped Raucous Theater for Temple of Malice. While this is a strict downgrade, the intention behind this is to limit early broken starts from the RB Reanimator strategy enabled by Raucous Theater to bin a premium reanimation target with no mana/spell investment. While UB reanimator is a viable version of the build, it generally has less access to low cost discard outlets.

Singleton breakage

This cube breaks singleton for a suite of double fetch and shocklands, as well as two copies of Strip Mine and Wasteland. I designed this cube to have access to ample amounts of fixing, however cost of inclusion should come with consequences of life total, which is part of why I've omitted the OG duals.

Answers to 5-color soup

As many cube designers and content creators have discussed, too much fixing, especially in a higher power environment can lead to issues with the '5 color good stuff' deck. While that is certainly possible in this cube, I've attempted to address that in a variety of ways. As mentioned in the above section, there are double the strip mines and wastelands in this cube. In addition to that, I've included such hate pieces as Price of Progress and Back to Basics to punish particularly greedy players.