Eldamir's 2 Player Peasant Cube
Philosophy
This is a 2 player peasant cube with the following restrictions:
- Only cards printed at common or uncommon
- Depowered removal
- No 1-drop creatures
- No double faced cards
- Limit the amount of cards that forces shuffling of libraries
- Preference towards cards with simpler rules text (e.g. Unburial rites rather than Animate dead
- Some cards are banned for gameplay reasons (full list at the bottom)
When drafting with two players, the card pool that the players see will be smaller than in an 8 player draft. This means that cards need to be flexible and wanted by several archetypes. For instance supporting mono coloured aggro with 7+ one drops would be impossible without sacrificing needed support for several other archetypes. I cut all 1-drop creatures as there were few creatures that I wanted to include, especially outside of white. This gives me a larger variety higher up the curve, as well as allowing turn 1 ETB tapped lands to be viable for more aggressive strategies.
Lands that only produce 2 types of mana are excluded, as these have a lower probability of being useful. Vivid, Thriving and trilands are more likely to be picked up by a player. The bouncelands can hopefully be viewed as hybrid cards.
Drafting
Each player gets 5 tokens and 15-18 packs of 5 cards. Both players open a pack and pick 1 card. The remaing 4 cards are passed to the other player which then picks 1 card. At any time a token can be spent to pick an additional card from the pack.
With 15 packs, each player will end up with a draft pool of 35 cards. 150 cards out of 240 will be used for the draft, improving the probability of archetypes coming together.
Grid drafting 18 packs of 9 cards is another great format for 2 players. It is great when playing with people unfamiliar with the cube, as they are free to ask questions about any card without revealing information.
Sealed
Each player get 120 cards and have to build two 40 card decks with a sideboard of up to 10 cards. With the increased card pool compared to 90 card sealed, the decks become stronger and certain strategies are more likely to come together.
4 players
The cube can also be played with 4 players. Either 2 headed giant format where each team gets 120 cards or 4 player draft with 5 packs of 9 cards.
Archetypes (needs to be updated, 3 colour decks should be common)
- Blink
- Control, reanimate
- Aggro, sacrifice
- Beatdown
- Go wide
- Value reanimation
- Graveyard value
- Ramp, landfall subtheme
- Spells matter
- Aggro/go wide
- Blink
- Reanimation midrange/value
- Reanimation control/combo
Alternative rules (under testing)
To spice up the draft, I’ve made a list of rare/mythic cards that can be included for variance. This
https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/1a30
For 120 card sealed: Each player gets 8 cards and can include up to 3 in each deck.
For grid draft: Each player gets 5 cards and can include 3 in their final deck.
Current banlist
Mother of Runes
Hymn to Tourach
Behemoth Sledge
Skullclamp
Isochron Scepter
Loxodon Warhammer
Grafted Wargear
Fire Covenant
Curse of Shallow Graves
Curse of Predation
Control Magic
Swords to Plowshares
Path to Exile