The fun and games cube is for all who want a break from the high power and variance of a vintage cube and do some less unfair things although still powerful. Here, you don't have to decide between picking the good thing vs. the fun thing, as all cards are both fun and good! The cube rewards drafting highly synergistic decks with some generally good support cards like card draw or removal. To me it was important to make every strategy interactable with in principle and greatly reduce the number of non-games. For this, I don't include cards that are difficult to interact with, e.g. hexproof or indestructible effects, and cards that were simply too powerful on their own. Most of the cards in this cube serve multiple purposes which creates tension in drafts that I believe is necessary for an interesting experience. In addition, most cards are playable on their own, but maybe a little below rate. This reduces the number of "non-drafts" or trainwrecks greatly. I try to keep mana curves relatively low in general. All in all, this cube is a little like The Creative Cube by @kModz, with notable differences being a reduction of cards that can run away with the game on their own, the lack of a legendary matters archetype, the inclusion of sub-themes like equipments and being 540 cards instead of 385.

Below are the archetypes listed in the top right, some signpost cards in the bottom left and main themes of the colors on the diagonal. Keep in mind that the multicolor cards in this cube are often the most powerful to act as signs that specific color combinations are open during the draft. This should be a four-dimensional Matrix, but that is a little unfeasible. Combining these is left to the creativity of the drafter!

This is a synergy focused unpowered legacy cube. It's a cube about big and varied board states, but also tight games due to painful manabases (horizon lands, double fetches, double shocks). I try to maximize fun above all. However, one disclaimer: There is a lot of text on cards and this can feel overwhelming compared to e.g. a peasant cube. This complexity is a necessary evil to attain the feeling that I want from this cube. Drafts are difficult, because it requires thinking beyond whats the best card, curve and manabase, but also how your whole deck interacts with itself. Games can be complex, but not necessarily long as the manabases are painful, lifegain is few and far between and there is a lot of evasion. However, I promise learning this cube is a hell of a lot of fun! Feel free to reach out to me if you feel like something does not serve the purpose of being fun.

I try to avoid any cards that can change the outcome of a game on their own. However, powerful cards that are also synergistic are allowed, like nettlecyst, embercleave, Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd , snapcaster mage, Securitron Squadron, or Tireless Tracker . These sort of cards represent the "power" of this cube and serve as hyper signposts as they do support and in some cases, require, some synergy. Cards that are not focused on some specific synergy are good support cards for various strategies, in general they are either removal or card draw and it is probably a good idea to pick some of these cards up during a draft.

This is a cube draftable in paper with no rule changes. Drafts work best with pods of 6-10 people and standard drafting. The packs should be prepared as follows:

Separate the cube into the five colors and the rest, shuffle each of the six piles. Then, take 15 cards of every colored pile and shuffle those into the big one. Then, distribute the big pile evenly onto the five color piles and shuffle each pile individually. In the end, every one of the five piles consists of 50% cards of one color and 50% random cards (that could also be from that color, but are mainly lands, artifacts and multicolor cards). The packs should be built containing three cards from each of these five piles. This distributes the colors about evenly throughout the packs while maintaining complete randomness for every individual slot. Also, it's a little easier than straight up shuffling the whole cube.

With 4-5 players, there is some variance introduced as archetypes might not be well supported when such little of the cube is seen by the players. One way of counteracting this is making four packs per player in the same way as above, and then the last 4 cards of every pack are discarded so everyone ends up with pools of 4x11=44 cards and sees effectively 33% more of the cube, making it close to a 6-7 player draft in that way. Alternatively or additionally, one can hand out a copy of cogwork librarian to every player before the draft, that can be put into packs for two cards from that pack and can also be drafted again by other players (thanks goes to reddit user \u\UnlimitedBrettWorks for this idea). From personal experience, people had a lot of fun drafting with the cogwork librarians and strategizing about when to pick them over otherwise useful cards. I definitely recommend, especially for any synergistic cube like this, where sometimes two important cards end up in the same pack.

Many iconic strategies like sacrifice, flicker, landfall/ramp, tokens, +1/+1 counters and spellslinger are supported. There are also some more fringe strategies like equipments, artifact aggro and artifact animation control, ninjas and various graveyard themes like with lands. Also, there is limitless possibility to combine these strategies that never ceases to surprise me.

Last but not least, this cube is never really "finished" and I appreciate it if you take the time to mention your concerns to me so I can work on resolving potential issues.

There are a lot of archetypes that I will categorize into macro and micro archetypes. Macro archetypes are also sometimes called "pillars" by the community. They can be built around and combined in many different ways, with a lot of cards to choose from and are generally supported in more than two colors, although they can have one or two main colors. Micro archetypes are more narrow. I would define them as something one can construct an example deck for. They are often sub-themes of macro archetypes, combinations of macro archetypes or separate, niche themes that have some overlap with a macro archetype (like UB ninjas does with flicker or RW equipments with artifacts).

The macro archetypes are introduced here in no particular order while also often venturing into various micro archetypes already.

Flicker

Flicker is a classic strategy that is about taking advantage of Enter-the-battlefield(ETB)-abilities with cards like

There are a lot of nice options to flicker, including cards like

Flicker is mostly a white thing with lots of support in blue, but can be extended over all the colors in the cube with cards like

Sacrifice

Sacrifice is about sacrificing creatures and is mostly in black, with support also in white, green and red.

You can pair token makers like

with powerful sacrifice outlets like

More often than not, the sacrifice outlet is a good enough payoff, but there is more to benefit from it like

You can also steal enemy stuff and sac it.

As you can notice, black is necessary for a sacrifice archetype to work whereas red is optional. In fact, you can even venture into green with cards like

or you can try white for more tokens.

Tokens

There are loads of cards that make tokens in all colors, although white does it the best with cards like

Payoffs include

But also sacrife outlets paired with death triggers like cruel celebrant or Elenda, the dusk rose, or the amazing teysa karlov. You can also buff all your creatures with cards like Collective Effort or Poppet Factory (the backside of Poppet Stitcher) or benefit from having more or smaller creatures than the opponent with By invitation Only or Expel the Interlopers.

Landfall

Landfall can be found mostly in green with support in blue and red, and some in white.

Put a lot of lands into play with cards like

and benefit with big green creatures or

As you are playing a lands theme and there is enough land fixing in the cube for all your desires, it is not difficult to add some red, blue or white cards as well like

Spellslinger

Spellslinger is a tempo-oriented archetype with lots of powerful cards, mostly at home in blue and red. You want to play a lot of efficient non-creature spells like

and benefit from them:

You can also go into black or white or even green:

+1/+1 Counters

+1/+1 counters are historically at home in Selesnya. Some of the best cards with +1/+1 counters are

while payoffs include

You can also go the modular route with

Although, keep in mind, you often need artifact creatures for this to work! Therefore, this strategy is also very much at home in red

Artifacts

You might have noticed that I didnt include the green talismans - that is because green already has enough ramp. Artifacts in this cube can be played in many different ways, but mostly outside of green. You can play it as an aggressive artifact creature deck

or a grindy recursive strategy

Cheap Artifacts go handy with these cards

The aristocrat style cards can synergize with both of these directions

I guess there is more to talk about. A micro archetype could be defined by a card like displacer kitten or synergies like chrome-host seedshark with Rise and shine, adding the spellslinger theme to other archetypes. In a similar notion, pretty much all the macro archetypes of flicker, sacrifice, spellslinger, artifacts, +1/+1 counters and Landfall can be combined freely. As we are getting to more specific decks and strategies, I will add some example decklists at the end.

Golgari Land Sacrifice

If you go golgari and you are feeling spicy, you can also commit to a land sacrifice theme:

or any fetch lands. After sacrifing the lands, you can recur them for example with

The payoff for this is generally drawing cards or ramping a lot and finishing the opponent with big dumb green creatures. This synergizes with the Gruul Landfall or Simic Ramp theme.

Gruul Stompy

Stomp with landfall.

Boros Equipment

While I did not include the most powerful cube equipment of them all, Umezawa's Jitte because it was too powerful, the equipment archetype still works wonders. The idea is to take a bunch of aggressive boros creatures

and put equipments onto them

There are even cards that are both an equipment and a creature (or either/or)

The cards to look out for when trying this strategy also include

There is overlap/synergy with various artifact strategies.

Example Decklists

noncreature artifact animations and tokens control
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/6b3426b2-fa89-49c0-8895-5fac4a518a89

WB Artifact Creature Aggro
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/98986dcf-eaa6-458c-8e40-3d6387aca447

RUW(b) noncreature artifact animation control
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/e6b1bf36-6829-4e1b-b1af-f58ff6a348a5

BR (artifact) (creature) sacrifice
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/1e9ef588-072e-460e-8016-86d88b9f7ecb

Non-Blue Landfall and Sacrifice
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/1f07ac53-7cc4-410e-b718-de4f38aab317

WRG Hardened Scales
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/ca733717-ea98-44e6-bee7-17501b91814b

RW Equipments
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/d90d5832-9069-4ac2-92a0-034138e36e6e

RW Artifact Creatures & Counters
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/4216c0b5-3fce-4353-9a1e-7b8093c49802

Naya modified creatures stompy
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/6d2f7b68-7d4a-45d5-82e2-32c734dadd64

non black flicker deck
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/6b4d32d3-dd0e-4ebb-be40-4bfe6136a717

BW tokens and sacrifice
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/428b4d89-9271-45b3-acc7-3b8b7a498571

UR(b) spells
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/9f3825c2-8beb-4f0a-ac8d-291e0af53a2e