Summary

Inspired by Conspiracy 1 & 2, this cube is designed and balanced for 4-player free-for-all games. An emphasis is placed on cards that offer interesting interaction opportunities and decision trees in a multiplayer environment.

Players start at 20 Life and all players draw on their first turn.

Table talk, alliances, and politics are encouraged; take the throne!

Power Level & Speed

"Kitchen Table Casual" or "Commander-Lite": the cube offers no infinite combos and is almost always won via combat damage. Wrath effects are limited to 1-2 per color. By design, a good portion of removal spells offer something consolatory to the opponent (like a card, land, or treasure). x Myriad is the "Aggro" deck and most decks thrive with a midrange curve.

Mechanics

Keywords and mechanics are not isolated to particular color pairs but do appear more heavily in certain combinations, which the two-color gold cards help to signpost.

As befits the theme, many cards have a player become "The Monarch".

The Monarch mechanic is great for encouraging attacking, breaking stalemates, and speeding up games.

Subthemes include:

Tokens

Myriad/Melee

+1/+1 Counters

Face-Down Creatures

Get to bluffing with over a dozen morph creatures, two cards that "Cloak" and two that "Manifest". It's not always Willbender!

Landfall

Spellslinger

Reanimator

Monarch

Goad

"Let's Make a Deal"

Tricolor Wedges

Like Shards of Alara or Khans of Tarkir, the cube lends itself to drafting 3-color decks to take advantage of the large number of gold cards. Color fixing is plentiful, with all 10 signets and all 10 triomes included. Each tricolor wedge also offers two three-color cards that exemplify one of the cube's themes or major mechanics.

Flavor

Thematically, the Cube leans heavily on the "Monarch" aesthetic, with as many legendary Kings and Queens as possible.

Optional Rules and Variants

The Cube functions just fine under retail Limited 40 Card minimum decks, but after dozens of play sessions and iteration over multiple years I find it most enjoyable to draft this Cube with four packs of 12 cards per player (which minimizes wheeling the same cards over and over) with all players building minimum 50 card decks. 50-cards (around 30 spells and 20 lands) and can offer greater variance if multiple games are played, but getting the land balance right is not as intuitive since most players are used to 40 or 60 card mana base ratios.