Art by Dmitry BurmakWelcome to Unreasonable Cube!
The Unreasonable Cube brings the unique mechanics from Unstable into a slightly more reasonable draft environment. Leaning heavily on other artifact sets, this cube plays similar to master's set with a heavy artifact theme, and a bizarre collection of mechanics not seen frequently.
The cube is 420 cards, which is 360 + four lore seeker packs, so all cards will get drafted, almost always (there is a small chance the lore seeker is in one of the extra packs, and doesn't make it into the draft).
Mystery Booster playtest cards are fair game for this cube.
Contraption cards and contraption creators are included at numbers to mimic just over the asfan of the respective mechanics in Unstable booster draft. This means that not all contraptions are included. It also means that contraption creators sometimes have duplicates, in order to reach the required asfan for these mechanics to be viable in cube.
Major themes
- Contraptions
- Small Robots
- Big Robots
- Not-Robots
- +1/+1 counters
- Infect/Toxic
- Energy
- "Junk" artifact tokens
- Generic nonsense
Contraptions?
A bit of a reminder for players who haven't played with contraptions before.
All Contraptions are artifacts that begin the game in the Contraption deck until they get assembled. Assemble, reassemble and crank are keyword actions associated with this mechanic. When a Contraption gets assembled or reassembled, it is put on the battlefield face up onto one of the player's three sprockets. The back face of a Contraption, and thus the top card of the Contraption deck, indicates which of the three are sprockets the contraption is placed on. The Contraptions can be assembled by players or Riggers.
At the beginning of your upkeep, you move the CRANK! counter one spot to the right, and sprocket 3 goes back around to sprocket 1. When it is moved, any number of Contraptions that were placed on that sprocket can be cranked. Contraptions have a triggered ability that triggers when you crank them. You choose the order in which Contraptions are cranked each time you move the CRANK! counter.
Since contraptions are on the battlefield when played, they can be interacted with, including: destroyed, sacrificed, and tapped as a cost to pay for abilities like Ghirapur Aether Grid.
If one of the Contraptions would go to the graveyard, it's placed into the scrapyard instead, a special zone reserved for broken Contraptions.
Your Contraption deck can contain any or all the Contraptions in your card pool. You can choose to keep contraptions in your sideboard if you want to increase the density of higher-quality contraptions.
Color Breakdown
White
White is one of the best colors for +1/+1 counters.
White is one of the best colors for poison kills with toxic, with the ability to go wide with mite tokens.
White also has an excellent suite of removal spells.
Blue
Blue has the lowest creature count, and instead relies on casting powerful spells to turn the tide.
Blue has access to several powerful engine cards to build around.
Blue has a few blink spells which are very powerful in combination with big prototype artifacts.
Black
Black can make great use of junk artifacts, with multiple payoffs for sacrificing artifacts.
Black also excels at dealing with creatures with several removal spells that provide some useful tools to various game plans.
Black has the best access to -1/-1 counters. Combined with infect and proliferate, the counters can add up fast.
Red
Red has exceptional access to contraption creation.
Red also has the best access to artifact removal and burn.
Red also has some of the best support for artifact heavy synergies.
Green
Green is the most combat focuses color, with the biggest creatures as well as most efficient poison threats.
Green also has a mini sub-theme of a few defenders that can help you ramp into the larger spells in the format.
Green also has many ways to make the most value out of putting +1/+1 counters on your creatures.
Multicolor sections adhere to no notion of color balance - it's overrated anyway. The philosophy for multicolored cards in this cube, is that they should be high-synergy, or build-around cards. These cards don't fall into your deck, they're either actively sought-after, and key pieces to their respective strategies. (although Boros did end up a few too many "good stuff" cards)
And just to keep things interesting, there are two five color cards. Playing either of these cards will at the very least earn your respect from me.
This section is by far the largest of the cube, clocking in at (at the time of writing this overview) 106 cards. If you ignore the 45 contraptions, this is still the largest section of the cube.
A lot of these cards will serve as glue to make your deck function.
There are a lot of high synergy cards here as well.
There are draft-matters cards included - which are perfectly serviceable cards to play too!
The fixing in this format is somewhere between low to medium. The goal with the fixing is to have most decks be 2-3 colors, but it's possible to play 5 color with the right spell support. There are three 10 card fixing cycles. Notably, there are artifact lands, which have a lot of incidental value.
There are also various other fixing lands, including the thriving cycle.
And there are a few utility lands as well.