Overview

This cube aims to capture the power and pace of a retail draft environment. Many aspects of the design (creature count by color, creature curve by color, frequency of removal and other effects, etc) are extrapolated from Mark Rosewater's Nuts and Bolts 13: Design Skeleton Revisited article published in early 2021.

This cube is drafted with collated packs of 14 cards, with each pack containing:

10 Common or ETB Tapped dual land
3 Uncommon
1 Rare

The Commons and Uncommon card selections are basically a paint-by-numbers filling in of the design skeleton linked above with mostly budget / bulk cards. I filled in the Common skeleton three times and the Uncommon skeleton twice.

The Rare selections are much less rigid, and include effects too powerful for Uncommon in limited as well as many build-around or "sometimes treats."

Since packs are collated, viewing the cube list as a whole doesn't give a great sense of the density for different effects. It may be more helpful to view each rarity section individually, or use the default Playtest draft that is set to match the collation I use.

Commons
Uncommons
Rares

Draft Notes

The rarity printed on the card matches the rarity I use for collation for all cards except the Trials. These are not Uncommon power level on their own, and I don't expect them to get returned excessively often even if the Trials and Cartouches both appear at Common frequency.

I avoid hidden information mechanics in this cube for simplicity and accessibility, but I love Shepherd of the Cosmos and it fits the environment well so I'm running it anyway. It is the only Foretell card in the cube, and should be Foretold face up.

Footnotes

In 2024 MaRo wrote a follow-up article detailing shifts in the design skeleton to accommodate the new Play Boosters. This cube will still be set around the skeleton from the 2021 article linked in the Overview above.