Overview last updated: March 2025
*This is an extended 450 version of the smaller 360-card Jank Diver Peasant Cube.

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Welcome to the Jank Diver Peasant Cube! Jank Diver Gaming is a Discord community focused on drafting our Peasant and JDG Mainline Historic cubes for Arena play, allowing us to cube with a growing group of friends from all over the Americas and Europe. This is an ever-evolving environment that takes both design goals AND volumes of hard data into account. Our Discord community and Cube-centric podcast, The Jank Tank, can be found here:

The Peasant cube was Jank Diver Gaming’s original offering and grew out of the paper cube of one of the co-founders. The cube was easy to port to Arena due to the designer’s chosen cardpool, Kaladesh-forward Standard sets. The designer wanted to build a cube that drew from sets he had drafted in paper, having picked Magic back up in mid-2017.

The Peasant cube is significantly more focused on two-color themes than the Mainline JDG Cube. We feel that generating maximal power from uncommons is best accomplished by leaning into synergy and supporting focused strategies, since individual cards are not extremely powerful in a vacuum. There is no Peasant equivalent to cards like Nissa, Who Shakes the World or Ugin, the Spirit Dragon. The following primer is an overview of the supported themes in each color pair. While alternative strategies can be drafted successfully, a streamlined deck in the pushed theme will usually have the best results.

Speed: All array of different archetypes and match-ups. Respect fast starts and late-game engines equally. You likely need to do something starting on turn 2 at the latest to be competitive.
Balance: Balance is the designers' main goal for this cube. We want anyone to sit down at any seat, draft any color pair/strategy, and have a chance of winning the pod. We make changes and tweaks constantly based on experience and feedback.
Synergy: Aside from a few raw power cards, players are heavily rewarded for leaning into synergy and packages of cards. "Good-stuff" decks rarely win.
Removal: Waxes and wanes from season to season, though the cube has hit the high end of interaction lately. Removal is split between clean answers and more synergistic pieces that ask something of the player.
Land Destruction: There is a small chance that artifact lands can get sniped by an exile effect early in a game, but it's infrequent enough not to pose a real issue.

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UW has been fully reworked multiple times in this cube, beginning as an overly-narrow fliers deck, morphing into a somewhat loose blink deck, and recently being refocused into a color pair that explicitly utilizes artifacts. There are still trappings of a normal UW tempo/fliers deck here, but your Azorius builds will be textured by artifacts and Clue/Treasure/Food token generation.

This color pair offers classic UB control cards with a self-mill subtheme. Filter through your deck and fill your graveyard with spells while answering your opponent’s threats. You can lean into graveyard synergy or simply outcard your opponents with the power of The Bath Song or [card]Behold the Unspeakable]]. This is also a better home for Rise from the Tides than Izzet, since you're good at keeping the board clear enough to take a turn off to cast it.

RB plays as an aggro deck blending efficient attackers with payoffs for creatures dying or being sacrificed. The deck commonly beats down with red creatures and burn before resolving cards like Blood Artist to inevitably close the game. The deck can also skew slower and more sacrifice-focused with recursive dorks like Reassembling Skeleton and Retrofitted Transmogrant. There's a small steal-and-sac package here, though it had to be toned down at one point.

RG stompy is one of the least-specific themes in the cube, offering a classic midrange attacking deck. Ramping into 4- and 5-mana threats before backing them up with burn is a common play pattern for this strategy.

The Jund spectrum has a small delirium package at the moment, leaning on Patchwork Beastie and Wildfire Wickerfolk as two assertive beaters, and Fear of Burning Alive at the top-end to close things out. This is not an "every draft" kind of deck, but the package promotes some interesting draft pivots and smart in-game sequencing.

GW was formerly a +1/+1 counter deck, but resulted in a glass cannon playstyle that used up cube equity for hyper-specific counter synergies. The theme has been scrapped in favor of a wider-reaching tokens theme, though we're still in search of a few excellent token payoffs in the cardpool. Rosie Cotton is a huge draw into this strategy, and one of the better cards in the cube.

BW is best described as the deck that's most interested in getting Ruthless Lawbringer into play as many times as possible each game. It brings together recursion elements with sacrifice texture to play a super grindy game that wins of chip advantages. This is the best "Skyfisher" deck and often bleeds into Esper territory for additional bounce + permanent-based synergy.

This is the best graveyard deck in the cube, supplemented by creatures that bin themselves, a wide array of self-mill effects, tons of recursion and reanimation effects, and a few delirium cards/graveyard payoffs. It often gets played as a Sultai pile, adding blue for additional card filtering and stack interaction.

"Gravebreak" is WotC's nickname for "cards leaving the graveyard." This mini-archetype is entirely centered around Insidious Roots and Cadaver Lab, and completely restructures your priorities when drafting and building the deck. It has an insanely strong late-game, but is also easy to hate on and requires an open lane/clear signals in the draft.

Simic has fallen squarely into ramp territory, made possible by the addition of more viable mana dorks in the cardpool and generally stronger top-end in Green. Simic tends to be a value-oriented guild that ramps toward Sifter Wurm or Colossal Skyturtle while drawing cards. There has also been an intentional push to give Simic more late-game staying power through 2-for-1 spells like Rise of the Ants and Trumpeting Herd.

Our problem child for quite some time, Izzet has always been a top contender, and no amount of nerfing has ever really changed that. It capitalizes on spells you'd already want in your deck anyway (burn and countermagic), turning them into synergy pieces on top of already-great interaction. Many of Izzet's best cards have been removed over time, but the deck continues to play well across multiple playstyles, including token generating decks, hard control decks, or all-in spell decks using Eddymurk Crab as a finisher.

This is our newest seed at the time of writing. This package was added to cut into Izzet's redundancy of powerful effects, but also presents drafters with an interesting flavor of Izzet for the occasional draft. It leans on Marauding Mako and Scrounging Skyray, with extra support from cards like Containment Construct, Mischievous Mystic, and Improbable Alliance. There's naturally a ton of discard support to make the deck tick.

Aggro decks are at their best with a consistent, mono-color mana base in most unrestricted environments. This is not the case here, and Boros aggro is more than the sum of its parts. White and red both have access to a density of effects that produce wide boards and the means to pump them. Unlike most Peasant environments, 2/1 statlines don't play well here, so you really want your bodies to come attached with value plays, and then use anthem effects, timely removal, and raw power to push through wins.

The cube is primarily focused on creating powerful synergies within color pairs, but mono-colored decks are certainly possible. Mono-white and mono-red are aggro decks, mono-green is a ramp strategy, mono-black is a controlling midrange deck and mono-blue can play either control or tempo plans. If a singular color is very open at the table, mono-colored strategies can certainly be powerful enough to 3-0. More likely than not, a "mono-color" deck will play around 20 cards of one color with a few gold payoffs and 2-3 cards of another color.

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We hope that you enjoyed this introduction to our environment. We draft Peasant most Saturday afternoons at (2:30 P.M. EST) and our Mainline JDG Cube every Sunday at the same time. Rotating Rotisserie and Winston drafts organized by our active community members are also available and a great deal of fun. There’s always something to do or discuss at Jank Diver Gaming, so come see what we’re all about and start divin'!