Tempo Twobert

Cube ID
Art by Simon DominicArt by Simon Dominic

240 Card Unpowered Vintage Cube

15 followers
Designed by OzkanTheFlipRSSQR Code

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Owned
$1,080
Buy
$806

This is my soon to be third real life cube!

Here are some of the design goals I had when making this cube:

  • The cube will be singleton.
  • Draft formats:
    • 2-players: Pancake Draft, 9 packs of 10
    • 4-players: Regular Draft, 5 packs of 9
  • The players will get to play low to the ground, tempo-driven magic. Tempo is your effective spending of mana compared to your opponent's. If each turn, both players hit all land drops, spend all their mana on a single card, and attack and block evenly, the tempo is even, breaking that parity provides a tempo advantage/disadvantage.
  • Cards will be included to encourage proactively gaining a tempo advantage and maintaining that advantage to a swift victory. This means cheap and aggressive threats and interaction.
  • Essentially, this cube aims to throw you into tempo mirror matches.
  • This cube will have 55 non-basic lands. 4 dual lands for each color pair, the 5 triomes, and 10 more for 5-color and utility lands. With a land count this high it should be assumed the average deck is 3-colored.
  • The cube will focus on interactive games that award tight gameplay.
  • The cube will award drafting with a plan.
  • There will be no planeswalkers in this cube.
  • Every other vintage legal card is on the table as a possible include.
  • If a card is not included the reasons could be any of the following:
    • I don't think it's good or efficient enough.
    • It doesn't encourage the kind of proactive tempo-driven gameplay I want for this cube.
    • It's too powerful for the cube.
    • I don't want to buy it.

Some notes on exclusions:

  • Wraths (Wrath of God, Damnation): Primarily "catch up" plays where you simply use the tempo advantage to survive. Compare this to Pyroclasm or Toxic Deluge where you can leverage your 3+ toughness threats to proactively use the tempo advantage to try and end the game.
  • Grindy X for 1s (Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath): The fact of the matter is that tempo is a part of every game of magic and whether you're playing Aggro, Midrange, or Control, you are trying to leverage it in your own way. Some cards, like Uro, are powerful threat+cardadvantage plays that are obviously helping you to procure a tempo advantage, but ultimately are more encouraging of a durdle style of play. It's actually quite interesting that while durdling is pretty much the opposite strategy I'm encouraging in this cube, both strategies share a lot of the same kinds of cards.
  • Cheating on Mana (Dark Ritual, Tinker): This is more of a preference exclusion, as cheating on mana is one of the most powerful and aggressive tempo plays in magic. Moxen are just a step above the power level I want for this cube and cards like Tinker require playing cards that are completely unplayable outside of being cheated in.