Tribal Cube
(720 Card Cube)
Tribal Cube
Cube ID
Art by Victor Adame MinguezArt by Victor Adame Minguez
720 Card Cube26 followers
Designed by popefilter
Owned
$3,640
Buy
$1,562
Purchase
Mana Pool$1973.24

This cube represents the ambitious undertaking of approaching the theme of tribal in a cube of over 720 cards for my first attempt at cube building. Before setting out to build this, I read numerous posts from experienced cube designers about the issues with both tribal cubes and larger cubes. I understand the problems of tribal Magic in drafting environments - Tribal is an inherently linear strategy which can lead to the feeling of drafting ten decks shuffled together and simply separating them out.

This is why I've gone with such a large cube. One of the solutions I've found to the problem is to make the card pool large enough that you're not going to draft the same deck two games in a row even if you pick the same tribe.

I've also minimized tribe matters cards as much as possible outside of the actual creatures themselves. I've aimed for cards that are playable across multiple tribes to encourage the normal draft tension of having generally good cards useful in multiple archetypes. I've also tried to develop archetypes that are "bigger" than specific tribes so you can wind up drafting decks that can include multiple tribes and either forego tribal support cards or rely on them as a secondary strategy.

I've also tried to include as many good creatures who have multiple relevant creature types or maybe support tribes other than the ones they belong to or make tokens of a tribe other than the ones they belong to. A creature can be a body to one tribe and an army in a can to another.

There are also a plethora of changelings and anthem effects that allow you to choose a creature type to further allow support for multiple different tribes.

I have avoided symmetrical tribal effects to eliminate a complexity level since most tribal cards are non-symmetrical. This means no gempalm cycle, no classic lords (Goblin King, Lord of Atlantis, etc.), no Coat of Arms (despite its iconic nature), no Patriach's Bidding (it's effects would be a wash in this format).

I am still going through the process of balancing this cube, which is immensely difficult, since in addition to colors and specific archetypes, I'm having to balance for tribes as well. The tribes don't neatly fall across the color pie - Humans are primarily white but in all colors, Spirits are Azorius with a green and black splash, Vampires are Mardu, Zombies are primarily black but in all colors, Elves are green with a light black splash, Merfolk are Simic with a light splash in each other color, etc., etc. This isn't inherently a bad thing as you can wind up splashing nearly any color for nearly any tribe. The aim of this cube is to make tribes as modular as possible while still maintaining a sort of duel decks feel to the games.

I don't know how to evaluate the overall power level of this cube... medium? This is partially for budget reasons and partially to not push certain tribes out of competitive viability. I'm not aiming to simulate a constructed format so much as I'm trying to build an analog for my commander games where decks are more honed than casual but not so cut throat that it interferes with having a few beers.

There are a lot of graveyard elements to this cube. Some tribes - like Vampires and Zombies - like to play with the graveyard, so I put the support in there for it. Aristocrats and self discard/madness are two of the primary archetypes of the cube, so the secondary theme after tribal is definitely graveyard shenanigans.

Ultimately, I've come to accept that this cube is more top down while cubes in general are more bottom up, both for balancing reasons and by cube's very nature, it's more of a Melvin format than a Vorthos format. I come to cube from EDH, so I definitely have a bit of a Vorthos bias, but I've strived to not make mechanics secondary in the cube.

Mainboard Changelist+0, -0
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