Cycling is my favorite mechanic, especially in limited. I love how the mechanic allows the cards to be used early or later on. The idea of pitching a card away and drawing a new one instead is such a feel-good experience. I love it so much it makes me wish every time I draft that I'll have access cycling or something similar to play with, and so I was motivated to create the "cycling" cube.

The themes present here come from all the "cycling matters" cards. Doors to reanimate, tokens, flicker, counters, discard triggers, life-gain matters, card draw/lab maniac, and more. Plenty of alternate win-cons to have fun with as well. I would set this somewhere in the mid-powered cube level; and as for the "math"—I truly believe 540 is the perfect balance to allow a certain level of card frequency that enables support for your chosen draft archetype. Also if you draft with a group of 6
players it allows 2 separate drafts, if time permits, that features use of the entire cube! (270x2).

As for balance and power level a lot of staple cube cards are not included because I want people to draft the essence of the cube and invest in its strategies. When cards like "Lightning Bolt" or "Liliana of the Veil" or similar are present amongst the rest, you don't care about drafting archetypes; you just fall into "pick the strongest bombs.dec". Nothing against those cards, but if they don't support the themes here directly, or roughly meet the power level of the cube, I choose not to include them. Cards like Banishing Light, Assassin's Trophy, Lightning Helix are high quality, high-value, removal that I DO include but are included at a very low count, as not to overrun the cube with immediate counters to everything it's trying to offer in its play styles. However if one cards dominates "feel-bad" play in the environment then it gets the boot, and I try to find something a little more on the power level. This happened in the past when I tried cards like Notion Thief, Leovold, Emissary of Trest, and Containment Priest. Cards like this that just straight hose a feature of a cube with no effort, get the axe big time.

Anyway, enough talk! Give it a test draft and let me know what you think.

WATCHLIST:

BANNED CARDS: