Salut I'm Sebastian, this is my paper cube. I love Dan Scott's Ponder artwork, I do ponder a lot, hence this cube's name. It aims to be a more casual outlet for playing competitive patterns that reflect current and past non-combo play in constructed formats - mainly Modern and to some extend Legacy.

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Drafting

The cube is drafted primarily with 2, 4, or 8 players with a deck size of 40 cards. At its heart, there's a small focused card pool of 360 cards which yields consistent decks when drafted at a lower player count.

In 4 or 8 player drafts, players start with a copy of Cogwork Librarian in their draft pool to enable more synergistic decks and boost strategies reliant on Affinity/Improvise in the absence of Artifact Lands, or to simply discard them as draft burn fooder.

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Archetypes

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Card Selection ⚠️ Restrictions

• Baltimore Singleton - only one copy of each card except fixing lands, 3 of each Fetchland and 2 of each Shockland to support 3+ color decks and delirium/shuffle/life-loss/sacrifice synergies
• Companion keyword is treated as blank (e.g. Lurrus of the Dream-Den can't be put in hand from outside the game)

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✅ Notable inclusions

• Includes cards banned in Modern and/or Legacy, which IMHO are less of a problem in singleton formats given enough density of spot removal
  
  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Includes cards that snowball or put a hard clock on games, which encourage drafting enough efficient creature removal (these are still subject to exclusion at some point).
  
  

  

  

  
• Includes a rotating pool of stronger recently released cards into Standard that support at least one archetype to keep the cube fresh
  
  

  

  

  
• ...and some non-competitive or fringe pet cards.
  
  

  

  

  

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🛑 Notable exclusions

• No Mental Misstep, since it is an auto include in most decks
  
  
• No hard locks or prison effects that are difficult to interact with (e.g. non-creature)
  
  

  

  

  
• No fast mana or cost ignorer that lead to skewed explosive starts
  
  

  

  

  
• No cards that only hate on colors
  
  

  

  

  
• No cards that let you Venture into a dungeon, get The Initiative, or become The Monarch
  
  

  

  

  
• No Power Nine, OG duals, and no cards from the reserved list
  
  

  

  

  
• No silver-bordered cards or legacy legal cards only printed in UNsets
  
  

  
• No Universes Beyond cards except the LTR release, regardless of their prevalence in Modern or Legacy
  
  

  

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Aesthetics

I try to go for old frame, foils, or special versions - such as judge foils, tournament promos, remastered retro foils, or secret lairs - from artists I enjoy when replacing cards (e.g. Rebecca Guay or Magali Villeneuve). For cards with none-evergreen keywords I sometimes opt for the regular version if it includes the rule text.

All basics are Rebecca Guay retro foils.