Sudden Death Format Rules

• The starting life total is 1.
• The starting deck size is exactly 15.

How to draft

This cube is meant to be grid drafted by two players. Draft 6 boosters for a total of 54 cards. However since the cube contains 72 cards in total you can also do a normal draft with 4 players. In this case draft 3 boosters of 6 cards each.

Origins

As far as I can tell the idea of a 1 life cublet goes back to @BreadWedding.
Look here for his original posting.
Many of the general play patterns described in his post apply to my cube too, but the lists are very distinct.

Design goals

• The whole cube should fit into single deck box, including lands and tokens.
• All the cards should be cheap, so that I can take it with me without worrying about losing it.
• To make the draft process faster all cards should be simple and not wordy. I expect most players will have to read most cards and I want to be able to draft and play this in 20 minutes.
• Mitigating first player advantage (which is high in sudden death) by making removal mostly defensive until turn 3 or 4.

Tips

Many Sudden Death games resolve around finding outs to specific cards of your opponents. This is far easier than in normal draft environments since both the decks and the cube are far smaller. Also you can see all the cards your opponent is drafting.

Here are the threats you need to look out for:

Mill

Possible answers: draft cards like Turn the Earth or win before you run out of cards

Reshuffler

Originally I introduced these cards as answers to mill, but they are also a form of slower mill themselves.

One drops with evasion

Answers: Removal or lifegain

Direct Damage

Depending on the card or whether you are on the play or on the draw you can answer these cards with lifegain, removal or by forcing the opponent to block.

Mana

Take mana fixing and/or colorless one drops to avoid situations where you a functionally color screwed like this:
Lands:

Cards in Hand:

Life gain and card draw

Life gain is better than in normal games of magic and card draw is worse.

Variants:

If you want to reduce the advantage of going first, you can have the second player start the game with a tapped treasure token in play.

Card Evaluations S Tier

This card is the strongest card in the cube and very close to being cut. It is very good on the play if you combine it with a one drop and some way to increase its power on turn two. The main reason it is still in the cube however is that it is also great card on the defense and good defensive cards are very important. I am thinking about either cutting it, or writing defender on it. finally cut