Art by Matt StewartThis is my pauper cube, originally hosted at CubeTutor (cube #78807). It's been under continual development since around 2017, and overall I think it's the cube I'm most proud of. It's also the only cube that I actually have built in paper.
The environment is generally pretty high powered as pauper cubes go. My philosophy with this cube has been to enable as many types of strategies as possible, so whether you want to slap Armadillo Cloak on a Lagonna-Band Trailblazer, wipe the board every turn with Pestilence while your Guardian of the Guildpact chips away, or go infinite with Peregrine Drake and Ghostly Flicker, there should be something for you. I also make it a goal to ensure that every color can be played in both fast and slow decks, so a few early power picks don't have to dictate your entire playstyle.
At a fundamental level, pauper is about playing good, wholesome magic, with a focus on creature combat and incredibly efficient interaction. That's more or less what this cube offers.
Another 8 person draft yesterday! It went quite well and I don't have a lot of changes to make. There was good color balance, and even the decks that didn't win still had strong moments and looked cool.
The changes I made to de-emphasize GB as a color pair seemed to work out well - we had two GR decks (one green-heavy with sprout swarm, the other red-heavy with the goblin package), and a GW heroic deck. The black value cards all ended up finding their way into a sweet WB midrange deck that was splashing green for Basking Broodscale and Generous Ent, which ended up getting second place. I liked how the deck played so I'm bringing in Trusted Retriever as a little more incentive to pair artifact-sacrifice with white and not just red.
The 3-0 deck was UR ninjas for the second time in 3 drafts, and I'm slightly concerned that it's too easy to wheel the evasive 1 mana creatures for the archetype. The main change there is tweaking the cheap blue creatures to be a little more defensive. Also, Thermo-Alchemist makes his triumphant return to join Scatter the Seeds and the new flashback token producers like Acorn Harvest to revitalize the classic tokens/spells-matter synergy in GR.
Other miscellaneous tweaks:
- I think that Ramosian Rally is a bit awkward because it wants to go in a creature-heavy deck, but isn't really high-impact enough to make me want to actually cut a creature or removal spell for it. Hoping that Charismatic Vanguard can fill that niche a bit better.
- Seize Opportunity did not seem that exciting in practice and I felt like the red decks were a little removal-light, so I'm cutting it for Magma Jet.