Art by Raymond SwanlandA 450-ish-card unpowered vintage cube.
DESIGN GOALS:
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Synergy > Good Stuff – It should be correct to draft an archetype instead of drafting a pile of generically good cards. It should be correct to take key cards for your archetype over the highest-power-in-a-vacuum cards. My favourite retail limited formats feel like this (Innistrad, Hour of Devastation, Kaldheim, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, etc.)
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Sweet > Sweaty – Players shouldn't be punished for trying to do sweet things. Aggro and control should be viable (to keep midrange and combo in check), but shouldn't be the best thing you can do in the format. Combo should be present, but not the focus.
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450-ish Cards – Small enough to support build arounds without dipping into the dregs for redundancy, large enough to not see every card in every draft.
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Combo – The cube has some infinite combos, but I'm consciously avoiding cards that only function as combo pieces. [Kitchen Finks], [Murderous Redcap] and [Metallic Mimic] go infinite with a sac outlet, but are more than playable as fair cards. I'm also avoiding combos that can't be disrupted by the answers commonly available in the cube (i.e. storm). Removing non-interactive stuff is better than adding narrow answers.
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Broken is ok, sometimes – Contrary to the first point above, I do plan to run some powerful iconic cards (i.e. [Oko, Thief of Crowns]), even if they're a bit too good because they're exciting to open and play with. I'll keep the density low, and rotate them regularly to avoid the feel bads. (Also, selfishly, they're expensive and I want to play with them! Not the best justification, but I'm okay with it.)
THEMES:
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Graveyards Matter – One of my favourite play patterns in Magic is using my graveyard for sweet, sweet recursive value. I love setting up an engine to grind out a long game, or dumping things in the yard to use as another hand. Cards like [Sun Titan], [Snapcaster Mage], [Gravecrawler], [Burning Vengeance] and [Vengevine] are my jam. For the cube, there's lots of design space and it's well-represented across colours and card types, so it's a nice through-line to set the tone and flavour of the environment.
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Lands Matter – Another of my favourite things in magic (the more, the better, usually!). Lands that do things add another axis of gameplay and mean more of the cards you draft will end up in your deck.
INFLUENCES: