Art by Donato Giancola
This cube is dedicated to old-border cards that feel good to play.
The central goal of this cube is less about fostering a certain playstyle than it is about fostering certain feelings: the feeling of brewing around cards like Grizzly Fate-- of playing with OGs like Gerrard and Mirri -- of casting old-bordered foil cards that you just have to turn around in the light for a few seconds before putting them onto the battlefield.
The list ranges from Beta to Scourge (the last old-bordered set), though its focus is on the turn of the century and the early 2000's: the top 7 sets in this cube are (in order) Onslaught, Invasion, 7th Edition, Odyssey, Apocalypse, Legion, and Scourge. Almost none of the cards in this cube are intended to be white-bordered, despite how 7th Edition cards look when you hover over them. 7th Edition foils are all black-bordered, unlike their non-foil counterparts -- thus their insane price tags. I sadly do not own every card in this cube in the version depicted, though I one day hope to "finish" changing the versions I do own.
This cube selectively breaks singleton for various reasons. For a list of singleton-breaks and their reasonings, see the end of this overview.
Why So Many Cards? That's Way Too Many Cards.
Yes, this is a pretty large cube. But this cube is not meant to be an environment for limit-testing your draft knowledge of a tight list. It is meant to be an environment that evokes the wonder of these wonderful old cards in a more casual way. This cube is meant to be played via Sealed just as much as it is meant to be drafted. This cube is meant to be looked at and touched just as much as it is meant to be played with.
Major Archetypes:
The bread and butter of the cube. If you aren't feeling any particularly specific lane, you will most likely end up in one of these buckets.
- Aggro (
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): - Graveyard (
): - Control (
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): - Ramp (
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Ah, tribal synergy, the bane of cube designers everywhere. How do you craft an environment that actually supports tribal synergies without their being overwhelmingly parasitic? Usually, you can't. My cube offers no bold new answer to this longstanding issue. Instead, I have chosen to embrace the classic lords and tribes of golden-age Magic with all of their pros and cons. This means that tribal synergy is intentionally only semi-supported. You can build an aggressive deck that forgets it has a few goblin payoffs. You can build a controlling deck that forgets it has a few wizard payoffs. Sure, some cards are not great without their tribal support. But this is an unpowered old-border cube: really, most cards are not great in a vacuum. So enjoy these iconic creature-type buckets if they please you, and ignore them and build Stax if they don't.
- Soldiers ():
- Wizards ():
- Zombies ():
- Goblins ():
- Elves ():
- Sneak & Show: Neither of these cards are as busted as they are in modern cubes because the targets are a lot worse. Red has only a few good options itself, but it works well with black, which can double-dip with Reanimator themes. Green has perhaps my personal favorite target.
- Stax/Braids:
- Wildfire:
- Tinker: Not nearly as busted as it is in modern cubes. Its only great target is this pretty boy.
- Morph:
- Threshold:
Singleton Breaks:
Ideology: There are (X) singleton breaks in this cube.
- Mishra's Factory (x4): Decks with artifact themes want 4 of these. Control decks want at least one of these. Monocolor decks want one of these. Plus, there are four different seasonal arts that I wanted to include.
- Dual Lands: There are a number of duplicates here to support guild pairs that historically did not have enough singleton land support (especially the enemy color pairs: Orzhov, Golgari, Simic, Izzet, and Boros).