I've made sweeping changes to my cube again after another year. This time, my design philosophy is a bit different than before. My most recent iterations of the cube have been to serve the needs of newer players playing with the cards without drafting them, hence the 10 pre-constructed decks at the core of the card choices. Prior to that, I typically operated with 10 archetypes in mind, often with some intentionally overlapping card packages depending on the archetypes.

More recently, I've been thinking about those cards in between archetypes as the most important ones for drafting. They provide tension in the draft for people playing different decks that could both use those types of cards because you can't count on cards wheeling as often when they can go into more than just the type of deck you're drafting. Since I no longer had students playing with my cube this year, I decided to lean into this idea.

My current iteration of the cube was built based on one of my favorite draft sets, Gatecrash. That set (and Return to Ravnica) had 5 2-color archetypes for the 5 Guilds present, but the draft experience let you pull from a number of cards that overlapped with adjacent archetypes. For example, the same cheap white creatures and spells that contributed to your Boros aggro deck, also helped you pay for more Extort triggers in your Orzhov midrange deck. Gatecrash had 5 colors paired as WB, BU, UG, GR, RW, so most colors had an ally color and an enemy color pairing (except White).

I mapped out 10 different arrangements of 5 2-color pairings following that model, with the exception in each arrangement being the identifier (so Gatecrash falls under the Enemy White heading). I looked for color pairings different than the ones I had used most recently and built my cube around those. They ended up being the Ally Black (UB, BR, RW, WG, GU) and Enemy Black (WU, UR, RG, GB, BW) arrangements. I picked archetypes within those arrangements that I knew had overlapping cards and synergies, which leads to the following archetypes:

UB Amass
BR Sacrifice
RW Heroic
WG Counters
GU Proliferate

WU Auras
UR Prowess
RG Power
GB Morbid
BW Reanimate

Adjacent archetypes in each arrangement have overlap, but there are some synergies that extend across the two arrangements as well. Prior versions of my cube have felt like drafting on rails, so I'm hoping that this makes for a better drafting experience with less reliance on getting the cards that fall within a player's chosen archetype.