Smith's personal taste - continually growing 2015 border cube.

Cube rules and expectations.

• All cards must have been printed in the M15 border to be eligible for inclusion. Cards with the Modern border currently in the cube will be updated when the correct version is found. This is done for visual appeal, to limit my card pool and force me to make creative decisions, and to keep the price down.*

• Flip cards are excluded because they increase mental load, make things more difficult with inner sleeves, and discourage players who are less familiar with me from reading the full text of the card for fear of damaging them.

• When possible, cards should have the most up-to-date template-ing and iconography (e.g. dealing damage to "Any Target" or having the colorless mana symbol.) (This even extends to the line separating rules and flavor-text and the legendary border, which will be used when easily available).

• Any number of basic Wastes can be obtained from the land base after drafting in addition to basic lands. Lands that produce colorless mana are included in the lists, but Wastes aren't game warping enough for me to consider drafting them. Cards that care about the Snow supertype have been excluded on the same line of thinking, they shouldn't be free, but there aren't enough good ones to synergize.

• No Combo. Meaning, no combination of two cards that just win you the game (Immediately), few "single-player" mechanisms like Storm, and in general nothing that looks really cool from one side of the table where the other side just kinda has to shrug (It is entirely possible that there are infinite combos I haven't seen, and I have noted an sacrifice combo that requires 2 specific cards from the cube, which I don't think will break anything, but I am monitoring it).

• Cards are chosen based on their versatility and ability to create interesting scenarios, not necessarily their raw power level (though, at some point, those two converge, and it's impossible to not include some cards that are simply powerful). (Some cards are being monitored for potentially being too powerful and warping cube gameplay, including: Umezawa's Jitte, Oko, Thief of Crowns, Balance, Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, Hexdrinker, and True-Name Nemesis)

This Cube started out as my first ever MTG construction (https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/1oh), before I even made a real deck. The
idea was to buy a bundle of each set and remove all the dirt, keeping only playables to draft over again with friends (I'd done a few Winston drafts at this point). Of course, after I started adding more cards and getting more into the game, I expanded my horizons, and then limited them some, creating in my head the framework for the cube as listed above.

*In its original version, this Cube contained cards from Avacyn Restored and Theros, as my card pool was very limited and I had some of those cards with most from the recent (at the time) sets of Amonket, Ixalan, and Dominaria. But I eventually removed them for both aesthetic and power purposes. I chose to keep the aesthetic the same and remove/not include old/modern-bordered cards to not confuse new players as I increased the size of the cube (and because I prefer the look of the new border), but now that I've far exceeded the complexity of your average new player I just keep that rule around because I find the restriction helps me come up with more creative solutions (who doesn't like a challenge?)