Art by Shreya ShettyWuthering Heights is a cube project I've been working on with one simple gimmick: Every creature (and token!) must have either Flying or Reach. This essentially nullifies what Flying means in the context of magic and instead serves as more of a restriction on what types of cards and effects the cube gets to be all about! Each color in Magic feels differently about flyers and you'll find that aspect gives the cube a colorshifted feel to it in terms of themes and archetypes. Read on for more details!
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I don't recall how I came up with the idea for this cube, but I do remember I was actively searching for a gimmick to design around and when I landed on this one, it seemed to work out pretty well given the breadth of the card pool I have access to and how simple the gimmick is to explain. As I developed the cube, however, the gimmick went from a simple silly restriction to an environment-warping feature that allowed me to support entire decks and archetypes that you won't find in any other cubes. This cube is able to fully a support a Green control deck, a Dragon deck without the whole cube being typal-focused, and ever shade of blue and white from aggro to midrange to control.
Typal Themes
I never expected the limited flying creature types to be such a boon to the design of this cube. For example, there just so happen to be enough Angels in the cube for a card like Firja's Retribution to get more than one card's worth of value out of it. Similarly, I can use Ohabi Caleria and Ishkanah, Grafwidow to signal micro-archetypes in those colors by virtue of those color pairs being saturated with those creature types. But Dragons are the biggest winners of all, especially given their popularity in some recent-ish sets (Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Adventures in the Forgotten Realm), and how they exist across all 5 colors. In most drafts I've hosted of this cube, there's usually at least one player drafting a dragon deck, often successfully! Supporting these typal micro-archetypes is one of my primary goals with the design of this cube and one that I'm excited to share with the players!
Skewed Fixing
I decided to take a different approach to lands and fixing in this cube, you may have noticed that the only full cycle is the shocklands, and some color pairs get an extra shock. You probably also noticed the lack of fetches; I'm a pretty firm believer in the notion that Fetches have their place in some cubes, but not all. In my primary cube, my goal is to imitate the feel of a constructed modern or legacy deck, so Fetches are a must. I even double up on them there. But in this cube, I don't have a good reason to include fixing at that power level, so I've instead opted to stick to two-color fixing. This results in most decks being two colors, but occasionally someone will pick up extra fixing and splash a color. To determine which lands to use in each color pair, I didn't just add strict cycles of lands I like. Instead, I looked at the themes and archetypes of each color pair and added the lands that I felt best aligned with those strategies. To that effort, esper tends to have 'faster' lands with the fastlands themselves, painlands, and pathways. On the other end, green color pairs tend to be slower and have the slow lands and surveils, exchanging fixing speed for utility. The effect of this approach is not immediately noticeable during draft and gameplay because "fixing is fixing", but I believe that this will subtly encourage decks to lean more into their strengths.
Lower Power Level
Power Level is always a primary concern when it comes to evaluating cubes that are more gimmicky and don't follow a format like a Vintage Cube or a Modern Cube. It's difficult to judge what to expect of the power level when you don't have an easy frame of reference. My initial goal for the Tempo Cube's power level was somewhere between a Modern and Legacy Delver-style deck. But as I've developed that cube over time, I've intentionally lowered the power level by removing power outliers, oppressive threats, and universal removal because that's the best way to make the themes and synergies shine. What's the point in supporting all these different archetypes if the winning decks always use the same cards? I've also found just by drafting a wider variety of cubes that I prefer a lower power level. I dislike the feeling of losing to singular cards that I just can't beat, or winning games where it didn't feel like any of my opponent's decisions mattered. With all that in mind... I completely threw that out the window for the first draft of Wuthering Heights. Specifically with green, I wanted to see how busted I could make a green deck that couldn't rely on having mana dorks or its usual suite of big stompy creatures. I had Sylvan Library for card draw, Aerial Volley as the best removal spell you can imagine, Silklash Spider as.. honestly I don't even know what I was thinking with that one. Anyway, that first draft was not good. People tried drafting fun blue/white bird aggro, black/white angel midrange, and jeskai dragons, but the Gruul Control deck just stonewalled them all. And I gotta say, I'm pretty proud to have built a cube where I can say that Gruul Control was an oppressive deck. But since then, I've gone to great lengths to tone green back to where it can still fill its Control role while not feeling so oppressive that other decks can't even build a board without getting plague-winded.
I still have a ways to go before I feel like all the archetypes are balanced around each other, but maybe that's just the life of a cube designer.
As much as I've done to scale back Green's power as a Control color, it is part of the design for the cube for Green to be the most interactive color. In another cube when you're looking for interaction for your midrange or control deck, you splash black or white. In this cube, you splash green. In that regard, try to pick up on what the best removal spells look like to determine whether the color feels open. Also note that CubeCobra AI does not know how to draft this cube, so don't take any playtest data as accurate. You will frequently see crazy strong cards like Sagittars' Volley wind up last pick simply because cubecobra has no data on them.
Another, perhaps unsavory, effect Green has on this cube is that its removal only targets flyers, but its creatures are primarily non-flyers. Green gets the most reach creatures in accordance with the color pie, and although its creature count is much lower than the other colors, it still gets access to some pretty potent threats. The adverse effect of this is that Green's threats essentially have hexproof from Green since they can't be targeted by Green's flyer removal. A simple wrath like Hurricane can end up looking like a 4-mana Plague Wind if the Green player has a decently-sized board. This is another aspect of Green that I'm hoping to tone down over time, and Tarkir was extremely helpful in that regard by providing a few more Green flying creatures to replace some of the reachers. So bear in mind that even though the green removal appears to be overpowered, it has its limits, and you may want to pick up some black or white removal that can get rid of some of those pesky archers and spiders.
In most cubes that I build, I try to avoid clearly supported archetypes because I prefer to just provide drafters with a set of tools to build whatever deck they want in the environment. I don't want every draft to have the same blue/white control, rakdos sacrifice, mono-red aggro decks that often show up in most cubes. Wuthering Heights is no different: I've added all the cards I feel are good and on-theme, and I've designed the cube's noncreature spells especially to support a wide variety of playstyles, but I still want to go over some basic and common archetypes that you'll see. Note that these 11 archetypes don't encompass the full cube, like for example I label UW as aggro, but I've seen several slower, midrange decks in those colors as well. This simplified overview also says nothing about 3-color strategies, which show up at least once or twice in each draft. My goal with this is just to give you a snapshot of what you should expect to see, and I've picked out some of the cards that excite me and will hopefully do the same for you!
Aggro Zoo
UW Flyers should be one of the decks you first think about when I explain the cube. Blue and White do flyers best and the archetype is clearly supported here. I have bloated the gold section with lords and signposts because I expect there to typically be two drafters in a pod drafting towards this archetype. Something to watch out for when drafting a deck like this is that the typical advantage of having evasive flyers is nonexistent in this cube. You lose some raw stats and speed from the creature suite so you'll want to find some countermagic, protection, and other tempo options to keep up the aggression.
Value Midrange
In most cubes I would label this as a control deck, but in Wuthering Heights blue and black are much more creature-dense so you'll end up with a high value-creature count when drafting Dimir. There are plenty of options to help you keep up on cards, answer opponents' threats, and grind them out in the lategame. Just bear in mind that you're no longer in the best removal colors nor the most removal-dense color, so prioritize the black interaction before someone else does!
Dragon Midrange
Adding red to the black value-pile brings some fast midrange beaters like Glorybringer and Shivan Devastator. While Dimir has better tools to grind out a long game, Rakdos wants to curve out with several threats in a row and finish the game off with some burn. These are also the two colors that benefit most from the Dragon subtype and you'll often find that you've just ended up with a bunch of them, so don't be scared to pick up noncreature spells that say Dragon on them!
Ramp Control
In my experience, Gruul is the best color pair for a control deck. You get access to the most Planeswalkers to help you keep up on cards, and your removal is the most efficient. You also benefit from some of the biggest creatures in the cube like Dragonlord Atarka. The biggest difficulty with gruul is making sure you're able to gain card advantage, otherwise you'll trade 1 for 1 until a threat finally sticks on the other side and you'll be desperate to draw into an answer.
Creature Midrange
Selesnya can often look like Gruul and just trading the fast, red Dragons for slower, more value-based Angels. There's a tricky balance here in how many creatures you need to pick up because of how limited green is in that regard. Oftentimes I'll see players with a board full of white creatures and a graveyard full of green removal which makes for an interesting but potent strategy.
Angels and Tokens
Orzhov tends to be one of my least favorite color pairs in most cubes, because I either see the same deck every time, or people avoid the color altogether due to a lack of identity. I believe I've landed on a happy medium in this cube with several different supported deck styles. Sometimes I'll see a version of classic orzhov aggro taking advantage of the small creatures backed by efficient removal. Sometimes I see a dedicated tokens deck looking to go wide backed by anthems. And, most exciting of all, sometimes I'll see a slow, midrange Angels deck that can grind just as well as Dimir. Since it's not a color pair I draft often, I look forward to exploring it further and seeing what y'all come up with!
Dragon Tempo
Who remembers this Standard deck? If I had been playing Standard during this era I 100% would've played the Dragons deck, what a sweet concept. I'm not super confident in how well I can support the archetype in singleton, but it's gotten a few extra goodies along the way and can otherwise serve as just a regular old izzet tempo deck featuring blue countermagic and red burn. There are plenty of options to go wide, go tall, or go under here, and you get bonus points for nabbing the best blue creatures from dimir and the dragons from gruul.
Spider Control
Yeah, you read that right. I hope I can say that this is the first cube featuring a supported archetype with that name. Perhaps the most annoying archetype, Golgari gets access to the best removal across both of its colors, and backs it up with a very defensive creature suite featuring tough-to-squish spiders that have 'hexproof from green' due to their groundedness and high enough toughness to dodge a lot of the red damage-based removal. It's important to note that a lot of the Spiders specifically want creatures in your graveyard, which can be pretty difficult to accomplish in the two colors with the fewest number of creatures. So if you're trying to draft this archetype, don't skimp on green's mana dorks or black's smaller value creatures, even if they aren't spiders!
Value Midrange
Boros is the color pair that I've had the most difficulty defining. It's so easy in other colors to throw it in the aggro corner, but that just isn't possible here. You get white's small creatures and you get red's burn, but there just isn't a high enough quantity of either to support that deck. I find the better strategy for Boros is to grab all the removal you can find, and them some big-game Dragons and Angels as top-end. I'm hoping to get more support for this color pair in future sets, so draft it at your own risk!
Ramp Control
Finally. All those times you've drafted simic ramp or simic control and gotten run over by creatures that you just can't remove. All those times you've had to splash black or white just to be able to answer opponents' threats. Your worries are over, my friends. Now you can have all the fun of slamming huge Hydroid Krasis and The Goose Mother after you've emptied your opponents' board using the most efficient removal in the cube. I always like seeing this color pair drafted instead of gruul because I find it to be less oppressive when it does its thing, and also the player just has more fun playing with it. This is one of my favorite archetypes in the cube, and I hope to see more interesting noncreature options for it in the future.
5-color Niv?
What kind of cube would this be if it didn't feature a 5-color Niv deck? Not only is Niv in the cube, but there's already so much support for dragons that you can even try to draft a 5-color Dragon deck! I find Niv to be such an important feature of this cube that I've intentionally upped the count of each color pair's gold section. To be honest, my worry now is that Niv is too good, even without fetches! Often if a player is already drafting Dragons, they're already splashing for a few off-color Dragons and Niv slots in there perfectly. I can't see myself cutting Niv, it's too cool of a spell to watch resolve, so I encourage you to try to draft him here!
Special thanks to all the Austinites who have helped me playtest this cube in the Austin Cubing group!
Shoutout to Maramas for their cube primer primer that inspired me to put so much thought and effort into this one.
If you haven't joined the cubecobra or mtg cube talk discords they're great places to get all your cube questions answered.
Thanks for reading, and I hope to see everyone at CubeCon this year!
Biggest disappointment of the year- Cynette herself doesn't have flying!!!