The Elysian Cube
(540 Card Cube)
The Elysian Cube
Cube ID
Art by Wayne ReynoldsArt by Wayne Reynolds
540 Card Peasant Legacy Cube33 followersDesigned by RosencrantzDiesRSSQR CodeView in Cube Map
Owned
$1,240
Buy
$1,104
THE ELYSIAN CUBE

EST 2018 | FKA BDE

The Elysian Cube will be featured at California Cube Champs 2024 and CubeCon 2024

The Elysian Cube rewards creative resourcefulness and crafty deckbuilding hinging on a fully loaded fetch-shock mana base. Cards are simple and intuitive, eschewing wordy text boxes in favor of strategic decision-making. Every choice you make in this high-octane peasant cube is an opportunity to squeeze value out of your cardboard.

This cube is my love letter to Magic.

I combined my favorite limited all-stars and many of the most powerful commons and uncommons to create an environment featuring Magic's most memorable cards. The themes and mechanics feel intuitive to players who are familiar with "Masters" level draft sets. No card will lead you astray, and the power band is relatively narrow (i.e. the strongest cards are only marginally more powerful than the weakest cards).

The Elysian Cube is a paradise for fair, creature-based gameplay.

All non-land cards are common or uncommon. Gameplay is quick, focused, and interactive. Synergy is abundant, and 2-for-1s are the key. The graveyard is my favorite zone, and splashing is easy because the lands are good. No ability counters, no irrelevant abilities, no weird tokens, and no extra bookkeeping.

updated May 2024


CURATOR'S MESSAGE

A not-so-brief note about some guidelines about my card choices, as complexity-creep and power-creep begin to overshadow many of Magic’s classic bread-and-butter cards. I’ll continue to harp on complexity in Magic in every discussion I have about cube draft because it is Magic’s most complex format in an equally complex system. Therefore, I check every facet of The Elysian Cube for opportunities to reduce card complexity so that strategic decision making remains the focus of this environment.

With respect to power and complexity, modern card designs continue to raise the precedent set by classic designs, invalidating long-time favorites like Gravedigger and Phyrexian Rager. As the game we know and love continues to expand, these nostalgic cards will remain in this cube for both their simplicity and their familiarity. In order to maintain a narrow power band in this environment, these cards may be regarded as the anchor for the lower bound of power herein, limiting potential future inclusions.

Modern card design has also tapped into the design space of tokens as another outlet for new card shapes. This has led to wordier tokens and more game pieces (e.g. 1, 2, 3), which I consider distractions and barriers to clean board states. With few exceptions, tokens have square stats and at most only one single ability word. White token makers have some typal differences, but they are generally irrelevant, and seldom are distinctions made between Soldiers, Human Soldiers, or Human Warriors. I believe Cloudgoat Ranger is the only card that cares about creature type in the cube, and its inclusion is justified above (nostalgia!).


Since 2018, I have regularly updated, curated, and iterated upon The Elysian Cube. In early 2024, the cube faced a major overhaul of the available lands. In line with suggestions from Lucky Paper Radio, the land base was expanded to 1/6th of the cube. This change was done in three parts, two extractions and one major addition.

First, the reduction of prescribed archetypes. Most notably removed was support for lifegain strategies. Moving away from prescribed archetypes reshapes the draft such that players are encouraged to explore themes without guardrails and find novel combinations that suit their own playstyles.

Second, removal of esoteric lands such as Glacial Fortress, Spirebluff Canal, Raging Ravine, Brokers Hideout, etc as well as removal of the signets. I targeted a subtle yet important opportunity to simplify mental overhead. Reducing the number of unique lands in the cube means fewer cards to read, which creates less cognitive load during the draft and gameplay.

Finally, fetch lands and shock lands became the foundation of the mana fixing. To round out each color pair’s land suite, additional lands were chosen to accentuate the play patterns of their respective color pairs, giving a small, nuanced texture to the lands. In total, over 100 cards in the cube are nonbasic lands, offering yet another angle for players to find value in all of their draft picks.


I’m happy and proud to say that this cube has become exactly the environment I want it to be. With great peace of mind, updates to the cube will happen much more infrequently and this collection of 540 cards will remain stable moving forward.

(April 2024)


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LANDS, LANDS, LANDS

Nonbasic lands are good!



Lands are the only cards for which I made exceptions for rares. Each color pair has 3 Fetch lands, 3 Shock lands, 1 Surveil land, and 2 Flex slots. Many decks are two colors with a splash, but multicolor decks are viable and the fixing in the environment supports it. The combination of fetchlands and shocklands often leads to incidental or "free" splashes of a third color. A handful of cards have off-color kicker or flashback costs, allowing drafters to maximize their fetchable lands.

Nonbasic lands make up more than 20% of the cube, meaning a typical draft pool of 45 cards will have about 9 nonbasic lands on average. Each nonbasic land you draft replaces a basic land in your final deck, so be sure to take them early and often to improve your deck!


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THE FIVE COLORS

wwwww

aggressive, tokens, +1/+1 counters, blink


uuuuu

control, blinking, card advantage and selection


bbbbb

control, sacrifice, recursion


rrrrr

aggressive, tempo, tokens, burn


ggggg

mid-range, ramp, recursion, tokens, +1/+1 counters



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DRAFT ARCHETYPES

Get creative! This list is not comprehensive; these are just suggestions. Archetypes extend beyond tradtional combinations of two colors seen in retail booster draft. Descriptive archetypes (rather than prescriptive ones) grant players the agency to create novel combinations and discover their own synergies.


BLINK

gwub



GRAVEYARD

ubrg



+1/+1 COUNTERS

rgw



SACRIFICE

rwb



TOKENS

rgw




SHUFFLING AND PACK CONSTRUCTION
I do this whenever I have time. So, not very often.

Moak's Novel Shuffling Method on Reddit
Visual Aid for Moak's Novel Shuffling Method
Moak's Novel Shuffling Method on YouTube


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