I recently went to a cube cabin and we had a long weekend to draft seven different 8-man cubes plus a bonus 4-man EDH cube. It was a great experience and every cube designer got a lot of feedback, positive and negative. Here is the breakdown of decks from the Rare-B-Gone draft.

3-0: Aggro

This deck had a lot of cheap interaction to go along with their powerful curve. As you'll see there were a lot of red drafters and we were all fighting over removal. I'm surprised by the lack of one-drop creatures. There were a fair amount of Llanowar Elves going around, which all ended up in the ramp deck. I believe they do work well in aggro to jump ahead to your three and four drops, but this drafter didn't prioritize them. They did put together the mini dino package and successfully went up the chain starting with Belligerent Yearling. Trample was a big factor in pushing through the various token based decks. They were the first drafter to try out Gut, True Soul Zealot, but it wasn't the best shell to showcase how potentially over powered it might be in this lower level environment.

2-1: Spells

This was my deck, and as I'm known to do, I ended up in some URx deck. Starting with an early Young Pyromancer. With all the cheap cantrips I only played 15 lands and included some bounce lands to avoid missing land drops. I'll admit that the Rise from the Tides shouldn't have made the cut over another cheap spell, but I thought I'd want a late game finisher or follow up to a board wipe. The main knock against this deck was the lack of hard removal. When the tokens didn't block well I had trouble keeping up. My loss was to the Gruul deck above.

2-1 Sacrifice

This is a solid sacrifice deck and its loss came against the Gruul aggro deck. There are only few out of place cards here, like Dragon's Rage Channeler, but that card is rarely dead when it's sacrifice fodder. I do like the inclusion of Revenge of the Rats. I hadn't thought about its role in this deck and had initially focused on the graveyard deck that was fueling the graveyard through other means.
Once again I want to look at ways of limited the impact of this archetype. I'll likely start by lowering the total number of Blood Artist payoffs and/or reduce the number of cards in non-black colors that feed the deck. I think if I can narrow the scope of cards that work in the deck it'll lead to other drafters taking those non-black cards for their decks and limiting the power of the sacrifice deck. The most oppressive pay offs are cards like Mayhem Devil and Judith, the Scourge Diva that can deal damage to opposing creatures. If I can reduce the payoffs to mostly ones that hit life totals that should stifle the deck a good amount too.

2-1 Sacrifice

The second sacrifice deck, with its loss coming against the other sacrifice drafter. Likely due to the other sacrifice deck haven't the payoffs that counted any creature dying, making for some lopsided board states. They did have a decent amount of spot removal and one of the best new cards in Origin of the Hidden Ones. Multiple times I overheard players stating that it was possibly too powerful. I'll need more drafts with it to see, but I'll keep it on watch. This deck ended up a little more "good stuff" rather than narrow sacrifice, which is a potential good sign that the cube can't fully support two sacrifice decks and one will need to have a plan B.

1-2 Reanimator

This deck has a lot going on and I really like how it turned out. There was some concerns about Reanimate being too strong of a card for this environment. This drafter did Reanimate a turn two Striped Riverwinder, which isn't helping those worries. But, that gameplan doesn't always pan out and there are a lot of tokens that block well and negate the impact of a large hexproof creature. This drafter also discarded and Reanimate their Ulamog's Crusher, losing 8 life, and then it got bounced right back to their hand. Some of the things I really like are the mid-range value packages with Mulldrifter and Shriekmaw. Unfortunately they didn't see cards like Victimize or Blood for Bones. One of the primary issues this deck had was the lack of removal, either in the form of single targeting removal for problematic creatures, or mass removal for large boards. Getting Archfiend of Sorrows or Shefet Archfiend would have done wonders.

1-2 Tokens

This looks like a reasonable deck, with a lot of on-theme token producers and pump payoffs. They may be a little lacking in their creature count vs removal/interaction. There's a few flicker creature/effects diluting the all-in nature of a go-wide token strategy. Looking at the ratio of white to red cards, it was also fighting a lot with the entire table that all wanted red. Perhaps there was an Azorius flicker deck going around as well.

1-2 / Ramp Pile
We didn't get a photo of this deck unfortunately. I recall seeing a lot of mana dorks and large green payoffs like Pelakka Wurm. I would have liked to have seen what interaction they played. They seemed to have been mainly green and black and splash white and red cards, likely for removal. This draft and deck did showcase one main thing, that the Talismans went very late in the packs and only this deck was slightly interested in taking them. I think I might cut them entirely and give each color two more cards and make the green cards replacement ramp spells like Utopia Sprawl, Rampant Growth or Springbloom Druid

0-3 Aggro

The second Boros deck fighting over red cards. They had a nice curve, but not a lot of late game or ways to punch through the final points of damage. I really wish we had time for a second draft with this same group. I believe card evaluation would have changed and even players in the same archetype as their first draft would have prioritized different cards. That, or be able to identify what was missing either in the draft pool, or in the cube as a whole.

• The sacrifice deck appears to still be too strong. I've been wishy washy on stifling it, and WotC keeps printing more and more cards that work well in the deck which pulls me right back into the cycle of adding more cards in right after I take some out.
• Talisman are will be gone soon.
• The other duplicate color pair was Boros and with that Red was incredibly overdrafted. I don't know exactly what to do with this information. I get that the red cards are highly flexible, which a great sign. Maybe this is a knock against the other colors?
• Let's look at the color breakdown of the decks where one of the colors was a main focus:
  White - 3
  Blue - 2
  Black - 3
  Red - 6
  Green - 2
• So it would appear that blue and green went under drafted compared to white, black and mainly red. My initial impression is this is due to wanting cheap removal and cheap pressure. Blue and green contain a lot more set up (ramp) and soft removal (counterseplls) and can be less proactive. Maybe it's due to an unknown environment and drafters wanting to play what they know will work right out of the gates. It could also be a sign that cards aren't telling what archetypes are available, or what makes them powerful enough to try and draft. I'll have the evaluate what drives drafters into blue or green and what changes can be made. One option is to opt for another "on the rails" archetype like Selesnya +1/+1 counters to show that green has a solid secondary aggro deck outside of Gruul.

All this to say, that this was a single draft and such a small dataset that it's mostly useless, but still a fun exercise!