Sacred Geometry is a celebration of Magic's most elegant cards. Card choices are driven primarily by sophistication of design, resulting in a broad power level band and emergent archetypes and synergies.

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Efficient and Powerful Icons

Some of Magic's first card designs have stood the test of time, and you'll find a wide selection of them in Sacred Geometry. Even though this a relatively lower-power environment, I do not shy away from powerful cards when they are sufficiently elegant.

Sacred Geometry currently contains 13 cards originally printed in Alpha:

• Savannah Lions
• Swords to Plowshares
• Disenchant
• Unsummon
• Counterspell
• Control Magic
• Demonic Tutor
• Lightning Bolt
• Birds of Paradise
• Llanowar Elves
• Regrowth
• Wild Growth
• Icy Manipulator

Aspirational Big Threats

Sacred Geometry's top-end threats have been carefully curated with a heavy focus on sentimentality and Magic's most iconic creature types. Big creatures in this environment tend to accrue value over time rather than on ETB and are worth protecting.

Minimalist Roleplayers

One of my goals for this cube is to focus on cards that do "one thing". Exactly how that is defined is somewhat open to interpretation, but where possible I prefer the body of this cube to be filled out with simple cards that are clearly worded. That is not to say that board states or games are straightforward in this environment, it's just that the complexity emerges naturally from the interactions between simple cards rather than just being printed in the text box of an individual card.

A general guiding light is that I am ok with more complexity on splashier, more expensive spells. Shadowborn Demon gets a pass for wordiness because it's a huge demon, but I try to avoid wordier bread-and-butter effects like Grim Bauble, Lose Focus, or March of Otherworldly Light.

Personal Favorites

The rank-and-file of the Cube is full of my favorite cards to play, with the goal of maximizing the joy of everyone's 12th picks. Power level is always relative, so only a small portion of the cards in the cube get to be appealing because they are powerful. The less powerful cards are selected for their emotional impact, resonance, and elegance.

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As the Cube designer, I am the subjective judge of a card's elegance with respect to this Cube, with few hard-and-fast rules. That said, there are some broader goals related to legibility and accessibility that I created to guide me.

• Cards must have correct type lines and unambiguous printed rules text that adheres as closely to the correct oracle text as reasonable. At first, I set out to only play with cards whose printed text exactly matched the up-to-date oracle text, but this proved to be almost impossible and precluded some cards or printings that no player, no matter how inexperienced, could possibly misconstrue. Note that I am currently breaking this rule for two cards: Miscalculation and Perilous Myr, for which no accurate printings exist.
• No two tokens with the same color, p/t and rules text, i.e. no 1/1 white soldiers alongside 1/1 white human soldiers, no 1/1 red elementals alongside 1/1 red goblins (r.i.p. Young Pyromancer), and a limited number of unique tokens in general
• No extraneous rules text, such as 'Partner', or 'cannot be regenerated'
• No counters except for +1/+1 counters and the extremely occasional -1/-1 counter
• No free spells — everything costs mana and your opponent being tapped out is meaningful
• Every cards needs to look very much like a Magic card. No funky printings! I also aim for consistency between frames, so all artifacts are in the modern, silver border frame rather than the original, brown frame.
• For now, I have foregone the following popular mechanics and card types which just don't feel elegant enough:
  • Planeswalkers
  • Double-faced cards
  • Vehicles
  • Adventures
  • Sagas
• No free spells, weird costs, or drastic cost reduction mechanics.