1. Overview
2. Cube Aesthetics
3. Archetypes
4. Duplicates
5. Utility Land Draft - 43
   • Mono-Colored Lands
   • Mirrodin Artifact Lands
   • Onslaught Cycling Lands
   • Colorless Lands
6. Booster Sizes for fewer players
7. Color-coded Stickers

This is a synergy cube with legacy format legality (since 2008!) built on the foundation that the heart of M:TG limited is based on smart decisions and incremental advantages. Major themes for this cube include the usage of the graveyard and artifacts in every color.

• No fast mana:
  • Sol Ring, Moxen - Mox Ruby, Mox Emerald, with Chrome Mox, Mox Diamond, Black Lotus
• No absurd card advantage:
  • Library of Alexandria, Ancestral Recall, Skullclamp, Timetwister
• No insanely powerful cards:
  • Time Walk, Balance
• No oppressive cards, or cards with poor gameplay loops:
  • Kalonian Hydra, Ursine Monstrosity, Gut, True Soul Zealot, Broadside Bombardiers, Recurring Nightmare, Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes, Opposition, Umezawa's Jitte
• No non-interactive cards:
  • True-Name Nemesis
• No gimmicky strategies
  • Milling aka Jace, Memory Adept
• Limited color-protection
  • No protection swords: Sword of Fire and Ice, Sword of Body and Mind
• No strict combos
  • Pairs of cards are more about synergistic-value pieces and can require some work to be assembled
    • Reanimate but no Entomb, Goblin Welder, Wildfire
  • No Kiki-Jiki, Mirror-Breaker, Splinter Twin Combo
  • No Persist Combo Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit
• No cheat-into-play cards:
  • Oath of Druids, Through the Breach, Sneak Attack, Eureka, Natural Order, Show and Tell
  • Tinker is the only exception to push the -artifact deck and since there is an abundance of removal for artifact creatures.
• There are no "free"/pitch cards:
  • Daze, Force of Will, Snuff Out, or Treachery)
  • There is an emphasis on reading (open) mana
  • There are exceptions to this for some proactive effects:
    • Frantic Search, Grief, Mine Collapse
    • It will always cost mana for interaction.
• No signets or talismans
  • e.g. Boros Signet or Talisman of Conviction
  • I'm trying to promote 2/3-color decks with a splash, or the occasional 4-color if the drafter prioritizes mana fixing.
• Life gain is kept to a minimum as it helps aggro decks.

This cube has curated tutors (nothing like Demonic Tutor or Vampiric Tutor), except some in green to promote a toolbox-style deck (Green Sun's Zenith, Birthing Pod, Fauna Shaman) and a couple blue ones Mystical Tutor and Tinker to encourage those sorcery build-arounds. Also there are a couple companions that help bolster archetypes that I want pushed ( blink: Yorion, Sky Nomad, and recursion: Lurrus of the Dream-Den.

There are no hard planeswalker limits (conventionally about 2 per color), but I do watch their numbers. I do believe there is a point where there are too much of them as I feel the gameplay is much more palatable with lower numbers of planeswalkers (around %5). The few I do run, I like to have a variety of them to hit either a common macro-theater (aggro: Elspeth, Knight-Errant, Chandra, Torch of Defiance; midrange: Liliana of the Veil, Garruk Wildspeaker; control: Jace, the Mind Sculptor) or act as a build-around (Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, Karn, Scion of Urza, or Wrenn and Six, etc).

Supplemental sets can be included (like Conspiracy and Commander) as long as there aren't any major rule changes (no monarch cards, no initiative, no class cards, no "emblem" cards like dungeons or The Ring tempts).

This cube promotes interactivity with deep strategic decisions. It contains synergistic and powerful cards meant to be drafted in a limited environment. Decisions during the draft is as important as decisions during game play. This cube has long moved away from the max-power traditional cube paradigm and a great effort has been made to reduce the oppressive, repetitive, or game-warping cards. There should always be a way to outplay your opponent, so there are few-to-none of the hard-to-deal-with cards (indestructible, hexproof, shroud; not that there is anything wrong with these keywords inherently). There are plenty of avenues for the Timmy, Johnny, and Spike player, albeit all decks still fall within the more traditional deck-building trappings (this is not a purely Johnny-style cube).

Essentially, this cube provides a way of showing off a creative draft deck or a highly efficient draft deck. I want players to be able to create their own decks according to how they want to play the game, so they are responsible for the pocket synergies in their deck. I want a higher variance in drafting decks, but low-variance gameplay with multiple branching decision trees. There is a high emphasis on how games play out as opposed to which individual, powerful, cards are in the cube. Each color pair contains multiple archetypes, so decks usually consist of combining some factors of one with the other, but astute drafters who read the lanes are rewarded (synergy!).

Finally, a great effort is always being made to reduce the complexity of the cube to welcome new players, while keeping it interesting for veterans and rewarding depth of draft and play.

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• No proxies
• No foil cards
• No foreign cards (english only cards)
• No un-sets
• A limit to Universes Beyond to try and celebrate the Magic: The Gathering IP
• A preference for old magic cards, the retro frame cards or borderless art

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Overall, this is just a sample of the type of decks you can build in this cube. Splashing a third color changes all these decks drastically. Feel free to experiment, you never know what may happen!

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Signpost cards can define highlighted archetypes within each of the guilds. The cube is mostly singleton except for the double Fetchlands, double enemy Shocklands, triple Prismatic Vista and triple Wastelands found in the Utility Land Draft.

The cards below are drafted using a voucher system, courtesy of user @Shamim. All those cards benefit the decks they are played in by having more copies in the deck without becoming oppressive, thus defining deck archetypes themselves. The voucher is only used to provide a second copy of a card, so you will need to draft both the card and the voucher. There can be up to 3 copies of the voucher in the draft.

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The Utility Lands are drafted rotisserie style, 4 picks per player. So in a 6-player draft, 24 cards are chosen, and in an 8-player, 32 cards are selected. I'm not trying to have this section be large as it is a lot to comprehend for new and casual players. Ideally, something on the order of 40 cards seems about right.

The main design goal of the Utility Land Draft is to provide archetypes with lands to strengthen their deck. The ULD is not to be used for premier fixing as those lands are drafted with the rest of the cube. Lands are arguably the most important part of Magic: The Gathering and it's a shame that most drafting environments the lands are not a significant factor. I get it, there are other - larger - design considerations for each retail set, but cube is not such a place. Here, with the ULD, we can celebrate all the wonderful lands with narrow synergies, within the context of draft-able archetypes; all without diluting the cube draft pool.

Mono-colored Artifact Cycling Colorless

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Booster sizes for fewer players:

To mitigate archetype dilution and keep them roughly with the same power with fewer than 8 players, the booster setup depends on number of players:

8 players: 3 packs of 15 cards (360 used, 45 picks, 360 impressions, 276 readings)
7 players: 3 packs of 16 cards (336 used, 48 picks, 408 impressions, 273 readings)
6 players: 4 packs of 13 cards (312 used, 52 picks, 364 impressions, 252 readings)
6 players: 4 packs of 12 cards (288 used, 48 picks, 312 impressions, 228 readings)
5 players: 5 packs of 11 cards (275 used, 55 picks, 330 impressions, 225 readings)
4 players: 6 packs of 9 cards (216 used, 54 picks, 270 impressions, 180 readings)

• "Used" is the number of cards from the cube included in the draft.
• "Picks" is the number of cards picked by each player.
• "Impressions" is the number of cards seen by each player, counting repetitions.
• "Readings" is the number of cards seen by each player, excluding repetitions.

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Color-coded Stickers

Yellow - Utility Land Draft
Purple - Original Copy (can be duplicated with a voucher)
Orange - Duplicate Copy of a card