After many updates that caused the jumpstart version of this cube to fall further and furhter out of date, I have spent the time to sort the cube into the 20 Jumpstart themes!

Let me know which theme is your favorite to play with now!

Every color is seeing some major overhauls as my philosophy towards the cube has shifted slightly.
Rather than explicitly supporting distinct themes, I wanted each color to have a stronger internal identity, and then let the interactions between those internal identities drive the color pair themes.
The cross-color themes are still largely the same, but this should give each color more opportunity to flex between archetypes within the color.

There's not much from aetherdrift that interests me, so it's unlikely that I'll do another card file update to include anything from that set.

White has the smallest shift in its identity, but adds a blink package that the cube has been toying with for a while

Blue had serveral cards that were too narrow in their application, and this shift looks to curtail some of that trend, along with focusing in on blue's identity of drawing cards, adding more effects that reward you for both drawing and discarding cards.

Black leans away from sacrificing and reanimating its effects to more generally just caring about things dying. It doesn't care HOW things die, it just wants to feast on their corpses.

Red leans into its identity as the color of equipment, adding a power 4 matters subtheme as the equipment transform any random creature into a threat to be dealt with. Red also shifts away from explicitly rewarding you for sacrificing things, as those were often ONLY paired with black.

With the addition of a blink subtheme in both blue and white, the prototype cards would end up being stronger than desired.

Green also lost the morbid subtheme, since death matters became so core to Black's identity. Instead, Green gained a "creatures in the graveyard" subtheme in exchange for many of the cards that would consume your graveyard for value.

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Are there any cards that were cut that you wished would come back? Let me know!

Welcome to foundations! FDN had a pretty wide set of interesting cards for this environment. I do have more product of FDN arriving soon (tm), so there may be another update with more FDN, as the outlook of the next year of mtg is bleak.

The dream of Knighted Myr was always very cool, especially as it provided an overlap between the artifact and +1/+1 counter strategies, but it never worked how I had hoped.
The other changes continue to give more support to the artifact and counters themes, as the previous update gave some powerful additions to white sacrifice.

The madness cards were an interesting addition, but ultimately too narrow, so the addition of more flashback cards should serve a similar purpose to madness, but with more flexibility in decks that can use it.

In contrast to a previous change that looked to reduce the power of the reanimator strategies, this update gives some of the power back to the reanimation decks, by adding a better landcycler, several new reanimation spells, and a new target in the form of Archfiend's Vessel.

Unlike White, Red sees additional support to their sacrifice strategy, as previously Red was the weakest color of the intended main sacrifice colors, so this should make the Red Black and Red White sacrifice decks stronger.

Green sees the smallest set of changes, but is more focused on providing some minor tweaks to the +1/+1 counters cards to provide more overlaps in strategies.

Foundations is coming soon, and although there aren't that many cards in the main set that are interesting, there are a TON of cards printed in foundations to look at that aren't necessarily in the play boosters that I'll be looking at.

White sees the largest set of changes, adding a populate package that also works with White's blink spells. Notably versperlark also works with many of the token generators in the cube, but especially the ones designed for the the populate package.

Blue sees a small adjustment that adds more channel effects instead of madness, as these have more overlap between the different themes, while the madness effects were really only desired by the heavy loot decks.

The biggest change to the cube is -1 gold card for every colour pair. The multicoloured cards tended to be very late draft picks, and would often clog up sealed deckbuilding with 10+ gold cards, reducing the number of viable options.

Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of removing my favourite card in the cube - Slimefoot the Stowaway. Slimefoot has unfortunately not been at the correct power level for a while now, but he's stuck it out out of favouritism. With only 2 card slots though, there just wasn't space. I may make a cube built around Slimefoot in the future.

White has been significantly underpowered as of the most recent update, as white lacked reasons to play white. The changes here should add cards that pull you into playing the colour.

Blue's biggest change is the removal of Waker of Waves. The Waker has been an iconic part of the cube for a while now, but ultimately has been too ubiquitous. It's good to have reasons to play a colour, but the Waker was often not just a reason, but a mistake not to play it if you had access. This problem is also exacerbated by the draw+discard cards making it easier to find the Waker, and reanimation making it very consistent to hit the battlefield.

Nothing major of note. Just small tweaks.

Although very few actual Bloomburrow cards made their way into the environment, I took this time to look at the amount of redundant effects and evaluate how many there are.

Overall there was too much recursion, too many cards that relied on reanimation, and too much ramp, which is why the bulk of the changes are in and

The addition of Carrot Cake gives white a second artifact that makes tokens that can be returned and re-used, making the identity of white much more reliable.

Surprisingly, the cube actually has less flying than play boosters! This shifts the flying count slightly higher while cutting some of the clunkier cards.

Black had WAY too much recursion, leading black decks to be overly grindy and annoying to deal with, as ANY creature that dies would inevitably come back. This change removes 3 recursion spells, and improves one of the black identities that was suffering - sacrifice.

The biggest outlier of strength in green was Evolution Witness. MH3 had fewer ways to add additional +1/+1 counters onto their creatures than this cube, where combined with the black recursive effects, meant that GB decks could easily return every creature in their graveyard to their hand again and again.

Additionally this is looking to reduce the amount of Proliferate in the environment, since proliferate only works with +1/+1 counters, making the cards more narrow than ideal.

With the addition of the new +1/+1 cards from MH3, an Infinite Combo emerged in the cube. Odric's Outrider alongside Basking Broodscale gives an arbitrarily large Broodscale and infinite colourless mana.

Infinite Combos are not a feature I would like in the format, so one of the halves had to go.

I settled on removing the Outrider, as the inclusion of both spawn for cheap sacrifice and MH3 +1/+1 synergy cards meant that the Outrider's effect had become FAR more powerful.

To compensate for the fewer death synergies, a new dies trigger was added, which will also help the white artifact decks after the death.

With the release of MH3, I thought it was time for me to critically evaluate the current status of the cube and the environment, starting with only the cards that I found the most interesting. There will be more updates with MH3 cards, but I wanted to test with the cards I owned before purchasing singles.

This resulted in 136 cards being changed, or 36% of the entire cube.

This is very disruptive to the Jumpstart Packs, which I will update at a future time.

White equipment was the least interesting of the white themes, so it was removed to make space for more cards that have interesting interactions between cards.

Additionally, White Artifacts sees a shift in identity, with multiple effects that can return artifacts from your graveyard to hand, which lends itself to a grindier identity and overlaps with white sacrifice.

Blue sees less of a rework than the other colors, instead leaning further into its identity as the color of looting, with an increased density of cards that care about drawing and discarding cards.

Black loses the explicit discard synergies as they lacked the necessary overlap with the other themes to be sufficiently interesting.

In its place is two subthemes that are more in line with what the rest of black wants to do: Creatures in Graveyard and Morbid.

Red, along with black both lost the Bloodthirst/Spectacle cards as they had trouble interacting in interesting ways with the rest of the card pool. Red also loses some of it's sacrifice focus.

However, red gains a LOT of Haste threats, including a package of unearth creatures that interact interestingly with the other graveyard colors in the cube.

Green loses many of the go-wide elements that it had, as they had few outlets to interact with the other themes. Green +1/+1 and graveyard both saw big additions with this update.

However, the green theme that saw the greatest benefits from this update is undoubtedly ramp. It gained several new top end threats, as well as multiple new forms of ramp that still leave them with a chump blocker so they don't lose too much life while trying to reach their haymakers.

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Mostly this update is about removing the worst performing cards from all of the colors, and some of the cards that were performing far better than expected.

Miraculous Recovery was the best reanimation spell in the cube, and it wasn't even in a color that was supposed to care about reanimation.

Black saw the greatest number of changes. Reanimation has been overperforming for a while now and has felt like the strongest deck in the cube. These changes remove two of the "Big" reanimation effects in black, so now there's only 3 effects in the cube that can reanimate something huge, but most of the ways to recur creatures to hand still persist in the cube, allowing reanimation decks to play more "fair"

Sacrifice has also been underperforming for a while, and while Zulaport Cutthroat is likely still too strong for the cube, Vindictive Vampire is too weak. Lampad of Death's Vigil should give sacrifice decks an outlet for the drain effect while combining outlet and reward.