I’m still playing around with this one. This started as a collection of “bad” cards, but that doesn’t make for an interesting draft. How can I make use of these cards in a fun way?

In Backdraft, players draft cards just like a normal booster draft, with one major exception: each player plays against the pool they drafted, rather than with it. The goal of the draft is to select the worst pool possible. Each round players receive a new pool (from their opponent) and build the best deck they can.

Backdraft is fun in part because drafting “bad” cards is advantageous, but also because each player must do their best to avoid “good” cards. As such, the cube should have good cards, synergies, and archetypes that drafters would want to avoid. Due to the nature of the draft, the archetypes have to be broad—a narrow strategy that could be found in a traditional draft could easily be avoided in backdraft.

There seems to be a fair amount of overlap in my mind between the Land Draft Cube and the Backdraft Cube. Since in each format I don’t want players to be unable to play their decks, I want to include good fixing and colorless cards (Hybrid mana isn't a fixture of the Land Draft Cube, but I intend to have a good amount of it in the Backdraft Cube). Additionally, I want to reward good drafting by including cards that are monocolored but have an additional ability in a second color. In the Land Draft Cube, this rewards players who draft good mana bases. In the Backdraft Cube, this rewards drafters who spread their pool thin across the wrong colors for their opponents. One important point is that any lands in the cube should be better than a basic land. Since players can add basic lands freely, they would have no incentive to play a land that was worse than a basic land. This means that drafting a land that is worse than a basic is almost like a null pick. I don't want that; I want every pick to have the potential to make the pool better, even if only slightly.

Archetypes:
Artifacts
Dragons
Domain/Converge/Sunburst
Life Gain
Ferocious/Power Matters

Can parasitic mechanics like arcane, infect, and energy have a home? Cards that produce energy without giving it an outlet seem bad at first glance, but quite playable if there’s enough payoff. Again, broad archetypes work better in Backdraft. 4/24/2021 -- No, I don't think it works.

Mill? Defender?