Now I removed all "until end of turn"/"this turn" effects and graveyard-matters cards.

I started this round of cuts by posing the question: what would it look like if all the Kithkin were gone? Then, when I saw I still had much to go, the next steps seemed logical: all the Serra cards, and the Sengir, and then the Kobolds and Orcs.

Next on the road down to 360: banding.

On the one hand, I thought it could be a conversation piece. On the other hand, it could take up the entire conversation. (It doesn't help that the Oracle text would take up the entire rules box and is only available online.)

Starting the endeavor of removing ~100 cards, mostly , but also , to balance the Cube while also taking it down to a real figure. First go the vanilla creatures.

Banding
Clerics
Soldiers
Humans Equipment
Mill
Sacrifice-drain
Sacrifice
Burn
Ramp

To get down toward a 180-card Twobert, I was more ruthless in my definition of "invisible tracking", sending to the maybeboard all static effects and non-enters or combat triggered effects I could; and I outright removed all graveyard-matters cards.

Since I wound up with only 177 cards from the Reserved List that fit a Bar Cube, if I want to go up to 180 I could consider from among these cards that were once on the Reserved List but got removed in March 2002 (demonstrating that it is possible!).

Yet another shard archetype that I had to trim a color off: this wasn't a terrible decision, but being such a new mechanic, I was left with not many cards to pull from. So I did what Outlaws of Thunder Junction did and included the bonus sheet of crime-committing reprints.

To condense this Cube from the prior one into a respectable 360-card size with distributions more or less even between the colors, I had to kill darlings regarding color combinations, as well as expand a bit the archetypes I'm working with.

I cut from this archetype, considering that Nissa, Who Shakes the World is probably the flagship, at the cost of the signpost golds being .

For this shard archetype, I considered various options--even whether I could include , and extend it not just to Improvise but also Convoke and maybe even Delve. I do like and because they include cards with Affinity for other things than just artifacts--and MH3 recognized this color pairing archetype just recently.

I expanded this typal archetype into one more fully capturing what these (or even just ) tempo decks are composed of.

Rather than include Manifest, Cloak, and Manifest dread, I focused this archetype--which, in its iconic color pairing, is more than well supported Eternally--on the mechanics I specifically considered lackluster, for being overcosted and leading to slow, uninteresting gameplay, and more recently for tacking on interaction-lessening.

I couldn't quite do Timey-Wimey, now that I'm out of shards & wedges, but I expanded this archetype from just Suspend to cards that generally care about time counters (in regards to keyword mechanics, not just for their own sake). (And there's something fitting about the hard control color pairing being about manipulating the mana curve.)

To fit this Eldrazi archetype into a color pairing, I went with one that included an Annihilator card, then filled it out with the traditional ramp. (In doing so, I had to leave out Nulldrifter.)

This was a somewhat difficult one, because the City's Blessing was always in , and Descend's signpost golds are in . But this Cube needs these Ixalan permanents-matter mechanics to be in the colors of that plane's vampires.

This one was definitely difficult, because I wanted to make it about BOT's Living metal mechanic, but that is essentially a (with a splash of ) set. As such, I picked a color pairing that worked for this Cube, and had to expand the archetype to a mechanic that was on my Maybeboard in the previous draft as one that I never found compelling: Vehicles. (Also, to bulk up the support in this archetype, another one that was on the Maybeboard: Robots.)

An essentially archetype--o the irony, considering it's all about subverting mana cost--this basically turned into a wildcard that could fill in the last color pairing I needed. ('s grasping for power at all costs fits the flavor, but for it's a direct flagration against tapping into the mana of the natural world to summon its creatures, etc.)