Overview

Vistas Unventured is the spiritual successor to my previous cube, Rainbow Synergy, which was featured at CubeCon 2022 and 2023. When drafting Vistas Unventured, you will have no access to basic lands after the draft and will instead need to draft all of your mana sources. You'll face difficult choices during the draft choosing between some of the most powerful fixing in Magic and highly synergistic cards across the full spectrum of colors. Without being bound by color, you'll be able to explore interactions between mechanics and cards that lead to complex and decision rich gameplay.

Summary

• Type: Desert Cube
• Identity: Multi-color synergy driven
• Plays: Up to 10
• Speed: Medium Power Level Midrange
• Variance: 80% of cards included in an 8 player draft

Table of Contents

1. Quick Start Guide
2. Draft Primer
3. History

Quick Start Guide

🎴 Draft: 3 packs of 16 cards
🏝️ Lands: Only access to 1 Prismatic Vista and 1 of each basic after the draft
🔂 Singleton Breaks: 2 of each fetchland
🧬 Archetypes: There are a handful of primary archetypes in Vista that span the colors, but they shouldn't limit you! This list is a guide for your first foray more than a hard and fast rule on card inclusions and what you can do. Generally if it looks like you should be able to build around something, you can!

• Legends
• Flicker
• Madness
• Sacrifice
• Lands
• Tokens
• Reanimator
• Spells
• Dredge
• Cast From Exile
• Game Objects

Draft Primer

Being a desert cube, fixing and lands should be at the front of your mind. To get you started, you'll have access to a Prismatic Vista, Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, and Forest in your pool. Though, 6 lands doesn't make a mana-base, so make sure to keep on pace with land picks and pay special attention to what lands your fetches can find. Vistas includes full cycles of Triomes, Duals, Shocks, and Surveil lands, and two cycles of fetchlands. If this is your first time drafting a desert cube, you should draft roughly 4-5 lands per pack to stay on pace.

There are also a plethora of utility lands that can be drafted to fill out your manabase. Some can play an important role in your gameplan while others may just be icing on the cake

The second key to the draft is identifying the core synergies of your deck and what secondary synergies can bolster it. For example, maybe you've drafted a Mayhem Devil and are planning to draft cards that play into a sacrifice theme. You may look to lean into a creature token theme in white utilizing aggressive cards like Heroic Reinforcements and Elas il-Kor, Sadistic Pilgrim or go the completely other direction with green cards like Tireless Tracker and Black Market Tycoon to generate game objects for you to sacrifice.

5 color legends

Azorious Flicker

Dimir Madness

Rakdos Aristocrats

Gruul Lands

Selesnya Tokens

Orzhov Solar Flare

Izzet Spells

Golgari Delirium

Boros From Exile

Simic Game Objects

A Brief History

Vistas Unventured is the culmination of my many years of cube design and my longtime cube project. It exemplifies the reasons why I play Magic and highlights some of my favorite cards from my 24 years of playing (Hello Gifts Ungiven). The cube has a long and rich history spanning the 9 years of its existence in one form or another.

At its conception back in 2015, it was a commander cube heavily themed on three-color splashy commanders and powerful vintage cube cards like Balance, Force of Will, Reanimate, Sneak Attack and Gaea's Cradle. Since then it has evolved to have a lower power level and cards more focused on building off of one another rather than standing on their own. In 2019, it was re-branded to Rainbow Synergy Cube to stress the design goals of being a multi-color focused mechanically driven cube and was featured at CubeCon 2022 and 2023.

That brings us to today with arguably the biggest change in identity in my cube's history - becoming a desert cube. There has always been a high importance to drafting lands in my cube, but now players will on average have roughly 14 non-basic lands rather than the 7 before. I've always adored interesting and complex manabases that balance the greed of extra splashes with the power of utility. Becoming a desert cube and asking players to draft all of their lands makes this a reality.

Welcome to Vistas Unventured; where you're not in a desert, you're in a rainforest.