Art by Raymond Swanland- Type: Singleton, no rarity or set restriction
- Speed: Medium to slow
- Identity: Morph, lands, and colorless are central themes. Mimics a retail-set experience focused on draft.
- Power level: Low - some cards are much better than others, but bomb-y cards are omitted. (For example, I recently banned all Mind Controls. Shivan Dragon would be a strong first pick.)
- Ideal amount of colors: 2-3
- Variance: Low
- My cubes emphasize the gameplay of regular Booster Draft. I don't want to lose what's fun about building decks out of clunky commons & bad rares, balancing synergy with Limited fundamentals.
- Bad cards are slower, so most printed cards are potentially playable, just like Limited. This lets worse strategies be viable, spotlighting previously unexplored cards & themes.
- I'm permanently chasing the high of hearing about the Spider Spawning deck and watching someone first pick Dream Twist. To me that feeling requires a context of "bad" cards; it feels more special to build a Ferrari out of a box of scraps than out of Ferrari parts.
- I value “time to stumble” so few games end just because one player hits their curve.
Cube Narrative
This cube's concept started from wanting to make a Morph-based Limited environment, and finding interesting tie-ins to Morphs. Morph sets like Onslaught and Khans of Tarkir have historically promoted higher land counts in draft, leading me to support land themes. Since face-down creatures are colorless, I also looked to Devoid for more potential interactions.
What's Sweet About It? / Why Should I Want to Draft It?In most formats, your fancy "what if" three- and four-card combo is completely unviable because your opponent won't give you the time to do it. Having some time to see the pieces come together is the secret sauce of this cube. I've been killed from 19 life by a Skyclave Geopede / Crucible of Worlds / Nahiri's Lithoforming for X=7.
This cube is maximizes the highs from retail Booster Draft with fewer of the lows. There are no mythic rares designed for Constructed here. Only the weakest planeswalkers are even considered.
As a result, it matters what your overall deck's plan is, and the engines you can assemble to gain resources and inevitability. Drafting offers choices between the "best" card; the nuts-and-bolts choice to fit your curve or fix your mana; or unique engine pieces it hurts to pass like Trade Routes or Exploration (and rewards awareness of their substitutes like Living Twister or Skyshroud Ranger).
Supported mechanics:- Colorless mana costs (Essence Depleter)
- Converge (Radiant Flames, Painful Truths)
- Cycling (Abandoned Sarcophagus, Astral Drift, Spirit Cairn)
- Devoid (Forerunner of Slaughter, Flayer Drone, Dust Stalker)
- Explore
- Ingest
- Landfall (Hedron Crab, Ruin Crab, Lotus Cobra)
- Morph / Megamorph / Manifest (Secret Plans, Trail of Mystery, Aphetto Runecaster)
In aiming for the look and feel of retail Limited, I constrain the number of keyword mechanics in the cube.
Supported types and subtypes:- Creature types (Minor theme: Dragons (Imperial Hellkite), Eldrazi (From Beyond), Wizards (Voidmage Prodigy)
- Deserts (Ipnu Rivulet, Ramunap Ruins, Ifnir Deadlands)
- Gates (Crackling Perimeter, Gates Ablaze, Basilisk Gate)
- Lands (Major theme: Deserts, Gates, Crucible of Worlds, Trade Routes)
Draft Strategy
I avoid designing archetypes entirely around one color pair so that more different versions appear dynamically, but certain build-around cards tend to be pillars, listed parenthetically above. Some color pairs are noticeably more or less common, from UG as most-common to BG as least-common.
The environment revolves around the use of lands, morphs, and colorless-ness, and the differences from one draft to the next will be in crossovers between those aspects and the specific support cards included. For instance, the BR Devoid deck will be very different with or without a Deserts package. Gates decks play differently with Crackling Perimeter versus with Basilisk Gate.
Received WisdomAny theme with an open draft lane can be very powerful, and each color has a niche. There are probably around two drafters at the table playing 20+ lands.
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White has fewer of the direct payoffs for lands/Morph/colorless, but has high card quality, answers to many of the key cards, and land-fetching to provide fuel for engine cards. White also has the best Cycling build-arounds, best sweepers, and can be either aggressive or controlling.
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Most blue decks will lean strongly into lands, Morph, and/or Devoid. The fastest deck in the format is UG Crabs, if it gets the right cards. It's rare for Trade Routes to be later than third pick.
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Black is the center of most Devoid decks and paying colorless mana. The most common aggro archetype in the format is BR Devoid. Black also has some of the best Morphs (we have a saying: "It's always Bane of the Living.") and is the best color at closing the game out with cards like Essence Depleter, Dread Defiler, and even Caustic Tar.
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Red can be aggressive, but is integral to control and late-game strategies through recursive threats (Akoum Firebird, Ashcloud Phoenix), sweepers (Radiant Flames, Slice and Dice, Gates Ablaze), and land-intensive finishers. You haven't lived until you've had to count your library before casting Nahiri's Lithoforming.
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Since it contains many of the land and Morph payoffs, green can and should be in high demand. The build-around cards opened early in the draft will strongly influence which types of green decks show up. There are enough of the ingredients that two decks aiming for, e.g., Morph synergy won't trainwreck each other, though they'll probably end up in different color combinations.
While I have now validated Rewind's inclusion concept (good with holding up mana for Morphs so you can counter and still pay a Morph cost on the opponent's turn), Moderation and Cryptic Pursuit haven't yet led to a successful deck. But maybe our meta is inbred, and fresh eyes will break them!
Aesthetic Choices
As a paper boomer, I've always loathed the 8th Edition card frame. To the maximum extent possible, I've obtained altered-art, miscut, variant-frame, and old-frame cards to support this preference, with almost two-thirds of this cube being altered-art.
NotesThis cube previously had a special rule allowing unlimited Wastes, but the drafted lands provided enough colorless mana sources that it was never used, so there is no modification to normal basic land availability.
I've received the feedback that Ingest reads as an odd inclusion with so little of the Eldrazi "processing" (exiled cards as a resource) mechanic from Battle for Zendikar. It's primarily there because it's incidental on a lot of the Devoid cards that otherwise "fit", but also adds a bit of risk to strategies that lean very hard on a couple of cards, and makes the Crab-based mill strategy less all-or-nothing.