The cube was made with the goal of finding a balance between fun interactive and board focused gameplay, rewarding synergies over pure stand-alone power and including iconic cards from magic's history (and yes, a bunch of my pet cards :p). It is also intentionally much heavier on artifacts than most cubes. Originally I started with rather strict themes for all color combination and have since then tried to relax these restrictions to make drafting and deckbuilding more fluid leading to the following archetypes being supported: Artifacts Artifact centric decks are strongly supported across all colors with different overlapping subthemes. Artifact aggro: Mostly a boros theme, you rely on early beaters, powerful equipments and go wide strategies. You will often find yourself trading a bit of speed for value from a green or blue splash. Core cards: <<[[!Cranial plating]][[!Esper sentinel]][[!Galvanic blast]][[!patchwork automaton]]>> +1/+1 counters: Centered around selesnya, also a rather aggressive strategy if a bit slower than pure aggro. The goal is to put counters on creature that disproportionately benefit from them and bash in. You also don't necessary have to be heavy artifact for this to work. Core cards: <<[[!luminarch aspirant]][[!Walking ballista]][[!Hardened scales]][[!Steel Overseer]]>> Brown ramp: Tends to be blue but mostly mono brown with whatever color was most open. Stack a bunch of artifact mana, big payoffs and lands disruption and you got yourself a deck. Core cards: <<[[!MIshra's workshop]][[!Thran Dynamo]][[!Wildfire]][[!Sundering Titan]]>> Artifact sac: Focused on rakdos and the duo of artifact recurring goblins. This has a lot of overlaps with reanimator and aristocrat strategies and is a good home for thopter sword combo. Core cards: <<[[!Goblin engineer]][[!Oni-cult anvil]][[!Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast]][[!Experimental Synthesizer]]>> Overall these archetypes are all kind of lose and overlap a lot into the more general "artifact deck" which is also deep enough to comfortable accommodate two players at an 8 person table. Self-discard This is a big theme of the cube that is heavily centered around the grixis colors with different flavors for each color combination. Rakdos is focused on an aggressively slanted madness theme, dimir is more into grindy looting and reanimator and izzet combines spell matters and strong discard payoffs. This means that there are a LOT of discard outlets available across all three colors which nicely overlaps with graveyard recursion themes. Core cards: <<[[!Anje's Ravager]][[!Rielle, the everwise]][[!Liliana of the veil]][[!Smuggler's Copter]] >> Aristocrats Your typical sac fodder/sac outlet/death trigger kind of deck, predominantly present in orzhov. There is a small zombie tribal subtheme present in the cube that is best suited for aristocrats. You will commonly reach into green for cards like [[Birthing pod]] or [[Grist, the hunger tide]] and sometimes in red for [[Mayhem devil]] and other artifact sacrifice shenanigans. Core cards: <<[[!Lingering Souls]][[!Skullclamp]][[!Yawgmoth, Thran Physician]][[!Blood artist]] >> Persist Combo Somewhere between a subtheme of aristocrats and a separate archetype depending on how it comes together. It's based around the combo of sac outlet, persist creature and an enable like [[Anafenza, Kin-tree Spirit]], alongside creature tutors. You also have overlap with the [[heritage druid]] combo making a strongly combo focused selesnya deck splashing black the default iteration of the deck. Core cards: <<[[!Kitchen Finks]][[!Woe Strider]][[!Eladamri's call]][[!Vizier of remedies]] >> Graveyard recursion There are a few variant of this deck but they are mostly centered around golgari. The plan being to fill your graveyard with recursive cards and either grind your opponent out or reanimate big beaters. Reanimator as a stand alone deck is available but I try to keep it at a reasonable powerlevel and to push players towards smaller recursive loops or full on dredge. And obviously, this has a lot of overlap with discard themes and sacrifice themes. Core cards: <<[[!Bazaar of Baghdad]][[!Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis]][[!Golgari grave-troll]][[!Survival of the fittest]]>> Land Matters This is a strategy that is centered in green with both red and blue being strong supporting colors. Aside from the obvious ramp angle there are two main subthemes. Land recursion: The gruul side of the archetype focuses on sacrificing/discarding lands for value and recurring them. This tends to end up on the more midrange side of the spectrum. Core cards: <<[[!Wrenn and Six]][[!Orcish lumberjack]][[!Strip Mine]][[!Titania, Protector of Argoth]] >> Landfall: The blue side of the equation but by nature of being slower and rampier you will often end up splashing in red and/or white. You will typically play a bunch of extra land drop cards, ways to hit those extra landdrops and landfall payoffs. Or just big old green fatties. Core cards: <<[[!Fastbond]][[!Meloku the Clouded Mirror]][[!Dryad of the Ilysian Grove]][[!Omnath, Locus of Creation]] >> Blink ETB creatures and flickers is always a good time and a way to pile up crazy amounts of value. This archetype is centered in azorius, but can easily splash for strong ETB cards from other colors, and is probably the strongest grindy control deck available if things line up well. Core cards: <<[[!Brago, king eternal]][[!Ephemerate]][[!47a6234f-309f-4e03-9263-66da48b57153]][[!Watcher for Tomorrow]] >> Spell matters Another classic, this time centered in izzet with a tendency towards jeskai. Not much so say here, get your payoffs and as many cheap spells as possible and go off! Also overlaps strongly with discard themes. Core cards: <<[[!Murktide regent]][[!Expressive iteration]][[!Dreadhorde arcanist]][[!Thing in the Ice]]>> The monocolored decks If you find your lane all colors except blue can support strong mono colored decks. I won't go in depth on what these are, red and white are the premium aggro deck (think [[Goblin Guide]] and [[Thalia, Guardian of Thraben]]). Mono green will ramp into the [[Craterhoof Behemoth]]s of the world and mono black will grind people into dust with discard and [[Necropotence]]. Pretty typical stuff. Now a few notes on things that were intentionally omitted. Splinter twin, dark depths and the likes: I'm not opposed to combos (see the persist creatures) but I like the combo pieces to be multipurpose like an [[Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit]] in white aggro or a [[Thopter foundry]] in artifact sac. Also Not everyone in my playgroup is a cutthroat competitive player and I don't like the feel bads that come with getting demolished by a combo deck with a perfect draw in this context. This is also why I'm keeping a close eye on reanimator, I already got rid of [[entomb]] and I'm thinking about potentially replacing [[reanimate]] and [[Exhume]]. Extreme power outliers: Outside of the obvious power nine, [[sol ring]] and [[mana crypt]] I like to include the most powerful and iconic cards possible in the cube. However I try to avoid cards that warp the game around themselves without needing any special deckbuilding. [[Oko, thief of crowns]], [[Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes]], [[Fractured identity]], [[Bribery]] and [[Treachery]] for example were excluded for that reason and [[Umezawa's jitte]] might also be heading that way. Planeswalkers: Well there obviously are some planeswalkers here but I've tried to keep their number restrained and outside of a few very iconic ones (Hello jace and lili) I also aimed for more build around type planeswalkers. I simply don't like planeswalkers that much as a card type because of their snowbally nature and I really don't enjoy the play pattern of games were a bunch of them are mucking up the board. This is definitely a personal taste kind of things which I could forgo if my play group requested it but I don't really expect that to happen any time soon. So yeah that's mostly it, I'd be delighted if people tried drafting this or if you have any comments. And if you see a card I'm missing that would fit juuust right in here please let me know!

LCV cube

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