I’ve been thinking about how I possibly could combine the ideas and strategies of some of the old preconstructed theme decks I like into a cube environment. The obvious starting point was have each two colour combination use a different two colour precon as it’s base. So White/Black could be “The Plague” control, for example, while Green/Blue could be “Trounce-O-Matic” Threshold. That was my first draft, v1.0 if you will, which I am probably going to keep working on. But some of the problems with that — namely, the heavy skew towards Rath Block and if Domain could work — have lead to this second version.

The idea is Blue and Black is Tempest, Green is Invasion. White and Red are the overlap, and thematically this is interesting too given that in the storyline the Phyrexian Invasion was staged from the plane of Rath, which was overlayed onto Dominaria… it just all works.

In my v2.0 version I just added the full decklists of the non-green Tempest block theme decks, and the full decklists of the green based Invasion and Planeshift decks. Apocalypse, with its enemy colour focus, muddied the waters a bit too much I felt. So because Deep Freeze and White Heat both had two copies of Master Decoy, I could therefore use up to four copies of that for example. The end result was OK, but still had plenty of room for improvement.

For this version of the cube — v2.1 — I wanted to move away from the “set cube” vibes, and have it a bit more singleton. I’m happy to have extra copies of key cards, but these need to be iconic staples that multiple precons had and multiple draft decks wanted. Eg: stuff like Disenchant, Counterspell, Diabolic Edict, Shock or Harrow.

I’ve consequently had to go to more decks to expand my options. It occurred to me that Nemesis was set on Rath, and it had “Eruption” in my Red White shoulder colours. That could help act as a bit of a marker there? Though in the end I took cards from all 4 nemesis decks, and from Apocalypse too. The Black cards of Urza’s Destiny actually feature Rath post Volrath/Crovax, so I added "Assassin" for extra flavour to disruptive black strategies in the cube.

I had to do a lot of trimming to get a bit of colour balance — white was pretty low in numbers. That being said my intention is not to support all colour combinations equally. I’d see viable strategies include:

1. White Blue: “Deep Freeze”

2. Monoblue: “Dominator”

3. Blue Black: “Widowmaker”

4. Monoblack: “Migraine”

5. Black Red: “Groundbreaker"

6. Red White: "Eruption"

7. Red Green White: "Scout"

8. Red Green: "Barrage"

9. Green White: "Heavy Duty"

10. Five Colour: "Domain"

Cards like Kindle, Accumulated Knowledge, Welkin Hawk, and Howling Wolf will be "Draft one, get a playset", and I think that the Slivers (which are only in UB) could also be treated the same.