Welcome to The Sludee Cubee!

I was inspired by playing @couchlife 's The Couch Cube to build my own cube. For the longest time, I would just browse CubeCobra and find something that might be easy to copy/paste. I don't think that was fair to the cube designers of the ones I tried to imitate or myself as an entrenched Magic player of ~18 years(?!). A big shout-out goes to the guys at Lucky Paper Radio and this article/episode that convinced me to actually build a cube. This cube was built out of my collection which was primarily an amalgamation of approx. 1,000 different commander deck ideas. While this is my first shot at really trying to build a cohesive pile of cards, I believe that players can build strong, synergistic decks with those cards.

Context

This cube was built with an 8-player pod in mind, but I also wanted something that could offer sealed pools for a 4-player pod. I also aimed to make sure that each color could hold its own, so that if a player sees an open color, they could lean into it.

1. plays what I call "fair" aggro.
2. plays tempo-based control.
3. plays with discard, sacrifice, and reanimation.
4. plays burn-based aggro.
5. plays creature-based midrange.

This lead me to the following two-color archetype goals:

1. - control
2. - reanimator
3. - discard & sacrifice aggro
4. - GO-FAST-SMASH (caveman aggro)
5. - +1/+1 counters
6. - aristocrats
7. - counter-burn
8. - graveyard matters
9. - go-wide tokens
10. - it's simic value. (does anyone have a clear identity?)

Note: thanks to the mana-fixing lands, it is easy to add a third or even fourth color to your deck, so it's easy to create some really unique decks in this environment.

All that said I think there are still good enough cards to build any version of Aggro, Control, or Midrange.

Restrictions

I have built this cube entirely from my collection (save a proxy for a Polluted Delta), so I want to wait until I've been able to draft this a couple of times in person to make some purchases and upgrade the cube. As for actual card selection in the long run, there are no double-sided cards, and I want to keep this cube to "legacy-lite" (it's nowhere near the power of a legacy cube at this point though), by looking to create powerful decks that don't just rely on the most broken cards in the game's history, and instead rely on the drafter's ability to play the game of Magic.

Power

This cube's power is probably best described as somewhere between Modern and Pioneer. I don't think it's as busted as Modern can get, but I think there are more powerful cards in the cube than there are in Pioneer? The manabase has the strength of a modern cube, but I only run one of each fetch and shock. Eventually, like stated previously, I would like to push this cube towards "legacy-lite" - I don't think I'll ever include the A/B/U dual lands, but I think everything else could be fair game. I would love some advice/insight in helping to describe this to new-to-the-cube drafters.

Gameplay

In the ideal, players will be able to draft highly synergistic decks that can create powerful board states. Ideally each deck has redundancy built in and interaction to halt their opponent. I have only identified one infinite combo in the cube, and it can only win the game with 4+ pieces, so it doesn't seem highly likely to dominate things at this point.

So far, I've seen some great builds in my own testing and in some friend's test drafts. I'm quite happy with how the mana-fixing promotes not only easy three-color decks, but can even allow for a fourth color splash in drafting.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed building this cube and I definitely have some ideas floating around about where to take it after I get it drafted a few times. I want to build this up to 450, and eventually 540 cards to allow for more players in general, create more variance, and support even more dynamic sealed pools, but I'm nowhere close to that just yet. :) Please feel free to playtest it and save your decks; I would love to see what you build!

Discord: tsludee