Art by Wylie BeckertOriginally based on Matt Greniers "A Study in Harmony" List, which is no longer being actively updated according to it´s creator. In short: It is a cube that creates highly interactive and powerful gameplay that marries synergy and power and greatly rewards situational awareness and technical play.
The Cube focuses on synergy over raw power, while still keeping options for all kinds of different decks. Just because you found the open lane, does not mean that your draft is gonna be on rails. Most Cards aim to fall into multiple different archtypes or synergy groupings to be as flexible as possible.
There's overlap in almost every synergy package, and decks can easily support multiple.
In contrast to the original list, some cards where added which could be described as narrow power outliers in their respective synergy buckets while more generically powerful cards where cut. (Matt´s list also heavily features a food subtheme which is completely absent. While the original list is mainly played online, this cube is only drafted in paper. IRL food decks can make for tedious and long rounds. While a small lifegain subtheme is still maintained, it is not nearly as prevalent here. The difference between online and paper play is also a factor in cutting a lot of DFC cards.)
The basic setup of the Cube is as follows:
White, Blue and Red all contain strong value engines in this theme (Digsite Engineer, Sai, Master Thopterist, and Breya’s Apprentice for example). White largely uses artifacts to supplement its aggressive gameplan. Blue seeks to use artifacts to enable powerful combos, such as Tinkering Cyberdrive Awakener into play for a surprise kill, milling the opponent out with Grinding Station, or simply generating large amounts of mana with Urza, Lord High Artificer or Krark-Clan Ironworks. Red aims to sacrifice artifacts for profit and strongly leverages Treasure tokens. Goblin Welder and his descendants are all strongly supported in this setting and are powerful cards worth building around.
Izzet tends to go wide with artifact tokens, Azorius can create powerful loops and Boros makes good use of equipments. That is not to say, that a UW aggressive deck does not work or that your boros decks can´t be controlling.
White, Green, and Black are the centers of power for enchantments. While the most obvious implementation of this archetype involves the classical Enchantress cards, the enchantment sphere contains a wide spectrum of deckbuilding possibilities, including +1/+1 counter, lifegain, and some aura themes.
Blue, Black, and Green all have access to abilities that leverage the graveyard and milling oneself. In addition to its traditional reanimation spells, Black has a wide variety of recursive Bloodghast style creatures that can provide incidental value. Blue has both Thassa's Oracle and Jace, Wielder of Mysteries - which are enabled by both Doomsday and Inverter of Truth - to provide more combo-kill options for Blue. Green pairs together with both of these colors to offer powerful self-mill cards as well as payoffs such as Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis and Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath.
Cards going in and out of the graveyard can also be leveraged by cards like Insidious Roots and Teval, the Balanced Scale.
In this color group, black and red are the primary colors that provide value through sacrificing while white can provide an efficient method to create objects to sacrifice. The most powerful cards in this archetype are probaby Yawgmoth, Thran Physician and Mayhem Devil, though there are a wide variety of other incidental payoffs for sacrificing.
Probably the most pure combo archetype and the archetype with the highest power cap is the lands decks. Lands primarily leverages the extra land plays provided by Fastbond, Exploration, Oracle of Mul Daya, and company to attain lots of mana, draw lots of cards with big card advantage spells, and trigger landfall effects high numbers of times in a single turn. Bouncelands can be critical combo pieces here. The ability to always have a land to fill each of your additional land drops will put cards like Field of the Dead or Dragonback Assault over the top. In addition to the more combo oriented approach, there are cheap landfall creatures and domain creatures that can provide an aggressive alternative build to this strategy.
While these five enemy wedge archetypes cover the basic architecture of the cube, it's just the beginning of understanding the possibilities. Card color should not necessarily be considered a hard boundary here. It's not inconceivable to end up in a Jund enchantress deck, or a Selesnya artifact deck. Finding unique ways to mix and match all of the given archetypes will lead to a higher degree of success when drafting and playing.
some more maybes.
