The Colorshifted cube is a 360 eternal cube environment that seeks to turn the traditional Magic color pie on its head. Each color is designed to take advantage of depreciated past incarnations of the color pie, tertiary-aligned mechanics, and other color pie bends and breaks to create a draft and play experience where each color in the cube functions differently from its typical play patterns.
1. Recognizable Archetypes in Atypical Colors. In this cube, each color allows a player to draft a deck that should feel familiar to Magic (Ramp, Tempo, Spell-slinger, Aristocrats), but in colors that aren't primary colors of those archetypes in modern Magic design.
2. Lower Power Level. Because colors are operating on themes that are depreciated or the fringe of what they're typically allowed to do within modern Magic design, they tend to be over-costed for their effects, and so the overall power-level of the cube needs to be adjusted down to reflect the inefficiency.
For example, as the primary control color, Red is meant to be the color of "unconditional removal." So that Red can have the equivalent of 3MV unconditional removal (i.e. Murder or Hero's Downfall), the toughness of creatures has almost uniformly been fixed at 5 so that 3MV red spells can consistently destroy almost every creature in the cube.
3. Evoking the feeling of "colorshifted-ness." While the themes of each color are meant to provide a more coherent and intuitive draft experience, there are a number of direct color pie breaks that don't cleanly fit into the archetypes, but are iconic or significant enough to help the overall cube feel more colorshifted.
Because the goal of this cube is to draw from depreciated or tertiary elements of the color pie, there is less intuitive overlap in colors than in traditional environments. For example, Rakdos has been the modern home of the Sacrifice archetype, so it's easy to find Black, Red and black red Gold cards that play into a sacrifice theme to create coherent two-color archetypes. Since there is less intuitive overlap between the colors, I've decided instead to focus on overall themes in each color that can be combined into familiar archetypes, hopefully with some fun and unique twists.
WhiteLow Curve Recursive Aggro
Reanimator
Spellslinger Tempo
Ramp (with an artifact subtheme)
Go-Wide Tokens
Enchantments Matter
Lifegain
Control & Card Advantage
Low-Curve Aggro
Spellslinger Aggro
As the cube focuses more on "themes" than color pair archetypes, as well as depreciated parts of the color-pie, there are very few Gold cards that fully embody both elements of what a color pair is attempting to do. As a result, unlike many cubes, the Gold section of the cube cannot and does not serve as a "signpost" for what each color pair "wants" to do. Instead, the Gold Cards of the cube should be viewed as narrow cards that may be desirable for a drafter in that color pair. It's perfectly possible that a drafter who is in a two color pair might have little-to-no interest in a gold card in their color pair, as it may not align with their deck's intended strategy.
Feedback coming out of CubeCon that red was far and away the strongest color. Going to try and cut a few of the top level power outliers and most efficient spells to reduce Red's power.
Plus a few fun additions from FDN!