Context

For a long time, I really liked the idea of drafting without really having a good outlet for it. On one hand, retail standard sets were full of chaff and boring cards that I just wasn't interested in playing with. On the other, while I do enjoy legacy/vintage cubes I've always had the feeling that most of the fun was in the draft, and then the part where you spend a couple hours actually playing with your Tinker/Reanimate/etc deck just wasn't nearly as much fun after the first few drafts. My goal was to have a cube made up of powerful and complex cards, but the fun lasted all the way through gameplay without getting stale.

Initially, I started around 2016 with a copy of Adam Styborski's well-known Pauper cube, but started to diverge as I didn't follow his set updates exactly and started doing a bit of my own design work. Eventually I wanted to make some major changes as the power level was a little low for my tastes, and games were getting stalled too often (a consequence of many of the best pauper bodies being generic decent statlines). Armed with a little bit more experience and confidence to do my own design instead of copying a list, the cube was rebuilt from the ground up to include uncommons. The improvement (for the feel I wanted) was immediate and immense.

Restrictions

As you would expect in a peasant cube, every card is common or uncommon with the exception of some rare lands - casting spells on curve makes the gameplay much more fun without taking away from the C/U feeling too much. Some consideration is given to including cards that have promos/alternate frames/just plain look cool for visual diversity factor, but every card still has to stand on its own merits.

The other major restriction is limiting the amount of ambiguous "annoyances" that exist in the real world outside of just gameplay. Morph/Foretell cards that don't play well with just a handful of them and inordinately reward knowing the whole card list, DFC's that players have to pull out and check the back while drafting, cards like Valiant Changeling that require a lot of oracle text/type checks, etc. This is also why I've held back from any textless or foreign cards despite my usual love of them.

Power

Very few cards are omitted on power level reasons, and generally speaking the cube is optimized for power. One of the primary goals is a showcase of the most powerful and complex commons/uncommons, and to have plenty of "wow, that was a common?" factor.

For those of you who are a fan of the Strix Scale, the target here is about a 9 (partial powered) for Peasant restrictions, or around a 5-6 (kitchen table to singleton modern) in the general population of cubes.

There is a small power level "banned list", in a rough absolutely never to might sneak in later order:

• Sol Ring
• Skullclamp
• Channel
• Library of Alexandria
• Mana Drain
• Tinker

Gameplay

General feeling and complexity is what I would describe as slightly above the usual Masters set. The goal is for aggressive, controlling and midrange decks to all be viable, though true combo is intentionally absent. Decks are typically 2-3 colors. The slightly higher density of fixing and multicolor cards relative to typical cube levels means that 4 or 5 color "signet soup" is supported and possible, but the current selection of rare lands (shock, pain, fast) is slanted towards two color and aggressive decks.

Booster Tutor

Booster Tutor pulls from boosters of primarily cut cards, found here