Powered conspiracy cube pushed to the limit for two-player Grid drafting!
Conspiracies break the usual archetypes by letting red aggro take reanimator fatties, 5-color good-stuff mid-range compete, and control reliably have a combo finish. Superficially, the cards are largely the same as typical cubes. Under the surface, their Elos completely change because the conspiracies are a sure thing. May you get the conspiracy of your dreams in your opening pack!
Archetypes
Hymn of the Wilds
Hymn of the Wilds aggro makes every
Rabblemaster variant into a early threat. It adds
Crystal Mox to every opening hand in exchange for a "harsh" deck-building condition. The result is a deck that can and will reliably kill you on turn 3 if you don't have creature removal. The downside? It's reliant on creatures like
Toski or effects like
Initiative if it gets wrathed. Not quite a glass cannon, but the deck-building condition makes it inflexible
and forces it to heavily prioritize critters during the draft itself. Just having this in the cube means 2-3 drops will be under-represented to other drafters and spells will be over-represented: key context! Don't forget to draft
Emissary's Ploy and
Power Play!
5C Midrange
Sovereign's Realm picks up where
Hymn of the Wilds left off: it puts those 1-drops and spells to use. These 5-color mid-range decks are reliant on broken spells from the game's early days to stall and out-draw under-costed fat. Both face the same issue in that they
need card-draw. Sovereign's Realm has to overcome its small starting hand and Worldknit needs to find its important cards. They're functionally similar in that both love cards like
Toski,
Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God, and
Damn. Sovereign's Realm will first-pick
Advantageous Proclamation to avoid having to include chafe and
Backup Plan to have a real opening hand.
Worldknit will aggressively draft the cube's lands to keep its effective deck size down. Most of the cube's best creatures and planeswalkers will end up in these deck as well as most of the premium removal. Multi-colored planeswalkers tend to end up here.
-based Combo-Control
With the threats turned up to 11, how can control flourish? None of the previously mentioned decks are terribly keen on wraths. Blue-based Control with green acceleration, white/black board wipes, or red burn has to make it to turn 4 or so. Once it does, the combos that the other decks can't be bothered to assemble start.
Kitchen Finks +
Muzzio's Preparations is infinite life and blocks. Savant +
Upheaval can wipe the board every turn.
Time Walk +
Double Stroke is game, but every deck is fighting for that. Have I mentioned that all of the conspiracies are first-picks?
Cheaty-face Combo
Cheaty-face "pure" combo is the last axis and it's there to keep aggro honest. With so many enablers, the fatties themselves are actually the premium picks with the enablers a risky afterthought.