"Power Creep" has been a hot-button topic among MTG players for as long as I've been playing. While concerns about this issue are legitimate -- especially over the past few years -- I feel like I've observed another serious problem in recent Magic design that rarely gets talked about: Complexity Creep.

Put simply, I think many cards in recent sets just have too much STUFF going on. Between double-faced legendaries with over a hundred words, sideways-oriented Battles, and seven different kinds of artifact tokens, I can't help but get the feeling that something about Magic's elegance and simplicity has been lost lately. This cube hopes to address that by providing an "old-school" playstyle without chaining itself to a certain time period.

Taking inspiration from the "Suckless" software movement, I hope to create a cube that provides a play experience focusing on elegance and simplicity.

This cube is designed with the following principles and goals in mind:

Magic cards look like Magic cards. Cards should not subvert the Magic frame -- Mana cost and name on top, art and type line in the middle, text box and P/T on the bottom. This means no Sagas, Cases, Battles, and so on. I prefer avoiding alternate frame treatments, but in some cases a special treatment is used for availability purposes.

Reading the card explains the card. Cards should say what they do and do what they say -- they should be comprehensible with minimal knowledge of obscure keywords. Cards with lengthy rules text for simple effects are avoided. Where possible, versions of cards with reminder text for keywords are used.

Magic is played with Magic cards. No cards should necessitate the use of a game aid. No dungeons or day/night cycles, and tokens should be simple mostly-vanilla creatures.

(-o:"become the monarch" not:ub -e:30a game:paper not:funny not:dfc -t:adventure -t:saga -t:case -o:mutate -o:investigate -o:"blood token" -o:"map token" -o:"powerstone token" -o:"dungeon" -o:"food token" -o:"treasure token" -o:"morph" -o:"disguise" -o:"manifest" -o:"cloak" -t:room not:split not:old)