Sudden Death
Inspired by Lucky Paper Radio's 1-life cube concept.
Grid Draft 6 packs. Build a 15 card deck (generally split at about 10 nonlands and 5 lands). Players start at 1 life. 2nd player gets a tapped treasure token to begin the game. A player loses if they force a draw. All other win/loss conditions remain unchanged.
My design goals were this: create a cube that can be drafted and played by two players in about 15 minutes. To enable this, players do a griddraft of the entire cube, then make a 15 card deck with what they drafted. Ideally, they'll be able to play one or two games between rounds of another event... and hopefully have fun doing so.
So far so good with this list. The treasure experiment for 2nd player is a rousing success, and makes the 1st/2nd player split feel much more balanced. I'm considering increasing the size of the list to 15-20 cards per color, with a random 10 of each being chosen each game. This should help with replayability, even if the list loosens up a bit because of it.
If you try this out, please let me know your feedback! I'm always looking to improve and love hearing other people's thoughts.
Updating to match paper list
BreadWedding posted to Sudden Death -
Mainboard Changelist+1, -1
Oops. Didn't realize this wasn't changed yet.
Gemstone Mine is a different Aether Hub. Hub didn't really feel like a proper splash enabler as much as I would like, so shifted it to the mine so you can get multiple instances of colored mana out of it. As the trade off, you can only use it thrice, so sequencing and when you play the land can be important. I'm quite a fan.
... it's been this way in paper for a minute, but I never updated it here with reasoning, so here you go.