CML's Cube (405)

[Christopher Morris-Lent]

hey everyone! i've been working on a cube for maybe a little over a year now? and out of my disgust with the modo cube's intentionally bad design i've taken mine in a different direction. my old tcgplayer article 'caring for your cube' set out a number of principles that jason independently discovered while making his cube, and i'm grateful to him for writing on them in greater detail and with greater focus on a more prestigious site. i hope our cube ideas become mainstream, because though i dislike drafting other people's cubes (irl and on modo), i dislike that i have to dislike it.

http://tappedout.net/mtg-cube-drafts/cmls-cube-is-awesome/

size: i had it as a 360 for awhile but 405 seems best; it allows for slight variation in the card pool without watering down the archetypes or diluting the possible synergies, etc. 450 is possible too, should i try it?

fixing: as much as possible favoring aggro decks as much as possible. no signets. no bouncelands. 77 lands. as high a power level as possible. (i don't have to double up on fetches since my cube is small, but any cube 495+ absolutely must IMO).

gold cards: are fun, but they have to justify their tough and restrictive costs (in spite of the glut of fixing) by being powerful and flexible enough to fit into multiple archetypes. some colors pair with other colors better too.

color-balance: not strict, who cares? on an average night we'll have 8 drafters and a color distribution of 5,5,5,5,6 drafters or so. worrying about this when you could be thinking about things that matter re. your cube's drafting experience is a waste of time.

power: the individual cards are weaker than the best cards in the modo cube but the worst deck drafted here every week would likely 6-0 a modo cube draft. i want a shallow power curve -- not jtms vs. tibalt, but scrubland vs. caves of koilos (if you will). no windmill-slam first picks like karn, upheaval, balance, swords of x and y. powerful cards should be more difficult to draft around (i.e. survival).

card choices: the squadron hawk is actually 4 hawks in a single sleeve.

mechanics: interaction is fun. no protection from x (except mom and 8.5 tails). no hexproof.

poison principle: no tribal except that which doesn't require the rest of the cube to be warped, so just mayor and champion. no cards that only fit a single theme. each deck should not pursue a single linear strategy, but should be doing five different things at once (poorly).

themes: graveyard (dredge, reanimator); multi-color aggro; ramp; Wxx etb effects; five-color tokens.

that's about it. if you have suggestions or disagree with any of my choices or think i just blew it, please tell me so in as strong of language as possible. thanks so much!

CML

[Christopher Morris-Lent]

forgot one thing:

sweepers: i switch em in and out. so sometimes damnation, sometimes bsz. sometimes day, sometimes winds of rath. fallout / firespout, rift / evac etc. i like a nice variety in them too (conditional and otherwise). i think the concentration is about perfect right now, maybe i could cut one?

fatties: also switched in and out. so sometimes sheoldred, sometimes scion of darkness. ink-eyes / grave titan etc. the current configuration might want one or two more, probably not less.

[Jason Waddell]

Hi Chris,

So, I'll give you my honest evaluation, and you're of course free to take or leave any of it. :)

I like that you're willing to experiment. You run a higher land density than any cube I've ever seen before. Well, any cube except mine. I run a modification to my draft format, found here: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/riptide-laboratory/gh3mHQeYyOE
The end result is that my drafts end up with 70 lands in them, about 50 of which are fixing (give or take a few). This indeed helps the aggro/control balance. 

I've seen your gold section before, and it scares me. Not that it can't work, but it's really all over the place. I don't believe in perfect balance, and agree that the environment is the most important thing to consider. However, your density of multicolor cards is pretty off the charts. Now, of course that's a viable dynamic. Some retail sets have lots of gold cards, and some have none whatsoever. Gold cards really change the structure of a draft. In general, you have fewer players fighting for them. You might, for example, have multiple drafters interested in a given red card, but only one at the table interested in taking Rakdos cards. Often the result is that you have a lot of gold cards clogging up the packs. Your environment's decks skew towards multi-color, so perhaps there's more competition than usual. 

You say some colors pair better with others, and that seems to be quite intentional with the distribution of your gold cards. In retail sets you have these stronger color pairings, and most cubes try (succeed or not) to make each color paring equally viable. Or so they claim. But it looks like you're pushing some interesting themes, and symmetric color-balance is sometimes at odds with that concept. As always, the needs of the set come first, but I'm curious if a bit more balance in the multicolor section would be beneficial. Then again, nobody played Boros decks in RTR, so whatever dynamic you want is justifiable.

I like the rotation idea, and it's one that I've played with in the past. I wonder if you might want to apply that to your gold sections. 

I would be careful with saying "no cards that only fit a single theme". The point of the Poison Principle wasn't to make sure everything is flexible, but to make sure your archetypes aren't just a static pile of cards tossed in there, aka "this is my cube's Storm deck". My next two articles give some in-depth examples of this, but I think it's okay to have what I call "archetype anchors". Think cards like Burning Vengeance. Innistrad had a lot of useful flashback spells. If you happened to get a critical mass of these, you could toss Burning Vengeance in your deck for some nice interactions. That card only fit in one theme, the flashback theme, but it played a valuable role. The point is that most of the tools in a Burning Vengeance deck had applications elsewhere as well. By forcing everything to fit multiple archetypes, you can cut yourself off from useful design space. 

All in all I like the overall power level you've gone with, and feel you have some strong foundation and design sensibilities. 

[Eric Chan]

I like the very light touch on the artifact section. That's probably the smallest colorless section I've ever seen in a cube, and I imagine that forces people to commit to a direction early on, rather than hoarding stuff like Jitte and Swords and waiting to see what gets passed. The nice side effect is that you don't have to clog up your cube with marginal offerings like Torch Fiend.

Regarding cube size, if you're accustomed to small cubes, 450 is probably too big. I started at 360, and slowly let my cube balloon in size over the course of a year, until it topped out at 440. At that point, it felt like aggro strategies were being diluted, with midrange being the benefactor. If you want to bump up in size a smidge, 420 is a decent compromise, as it allows you to run the odd 10-man draft with 14 card packs. If large group size is never a concern for you, though, 405 is probably the healthiest on the power vs variety scale.

The grossly unbalanced multicolor section frankly scares the hell out of me, too. Do Rakdos and Gruul really need a dozen cards apiece? Like Jason, my concern is that the one G/R player at the table could take monocolour stuff like Searing Blaze and Strangleroot Geist all day, knowing that nobody's going to fight them for that Flinthoof Boar in the same pack, and then grab it on the wheel. It seems like it would make drafting easier for players in guilds with a ton of gold cards, as they benefit the most from cards tabling, rather than forcing them to agonize over picks.

[Christopher Morris-Lent]

hi guys! i'm really grateful for the feedback.

another theme i forgot to mention is that my cube is a mono-eventide cube. eventide is one of the best sets of all time, and if you disagree with me (on this point only), you are wrong.

i also like having the second mull also be to 6.

moving right along!

point by point--

jason: 

-i love the idea for drafting lands. i can't justify fitting in factory or mutavault or more non-fixing lands than i have right now at the cost of actual cube slots. i think i'll try your idea. (in order to try and get people to draft wedges, i've also pushed fixing towards enemy-colors, so EVE but no SHM filters, AP but not IA painlands). 

-land density: another point i want to make is that while 77/405 is by current standards high, it's also lots of fun and it's one of our ideas that should be mainstream. with lots of lands you make fewer spell cuts and lose fewer games to mana-screw. it makes both drafting and playing richer. a high density of fixing is awesome. in a larger cube, though, it should be even higher. e.g. the modo cube is pretty stretched on playables for a bunch of different archetypes, so why not cut those and add lands, doubling or even tripling up on fetches and duals? with the same density of lands as my cube the modo cube would have 77/405*720≈137 lands, but i suspect the right number is closer to 150 or 160.

-oddly enough the multicolor cards seem to be picked more highly on average than the mono-colored cards. (bloodbraid for example gets passed not a lot, ditto souls -- though if they do make it around, that's an interesting signal). my guess is their extra power exceeds the extra difficulty in casting them, due to the density of fixing.

-gold distribution: again, i agree i should try to have it be a bit more balanced. i'm glad you also see that blue multi-color cards are terrible, though :) i've tried to compensate for the lack of blue cards by having a larger mono-colored blue section (blue doesn't need all that much help in cube!) but maybe pushing it a little towards parity would make the cube even more fun. for example izzet could have call the skybreaker or crackleburr or gelectrode. 

-multicolor wrap-up: it looks pretty ugly but it ends up working out (surprisingly well), try it! :)

-fatties and sweepers (well, all spells cmc 5+) get rotated out regularly unless i really love them. the gold section is included (sometimes broodmother, sometimes empyrial archangel, sometimes borborygmos enraged, godhead of awe, and so on), but i again agree i should take this further.

-poison principle: briefly stated, i'm with you on 'archetype anchors' and believe i have a bunch of cards in there that embody this idea.

eric:

-thanks for the kind words about the artifact section! swords and jitte and skullclamp and batterskull are slam-dunk first-picks in most decks and absurd bombs in most games, in my opinion impoverishing both drafting and playing, so we've got the 'fun equipment package' instead. (any suggestions on some playable equipment? i've looked pretty much everywhere and have been unhappy with recent cuts like sigil of distinction, machete etc.) grafted wargear is of course the best

-another thing you might notice is that (aside from neutered equips) the artifacts and enchantments are very powerful. i like this; these cards should be sweet, but i also like that to be kept in check with 'problem permanent removal' in the vein of trygon predator, qpm, wickerbough, mortify, putrefy, vindicate, bounce, etc. -- cards that are flexible and good regardless, instead of the 'marginal offerings' of torch fiend and the recently-cut duergar hedge-mage. there ought to be a dynamic tension between sweet 'problem permanents' and ways to get rid of them, in other words. i should say that the power level ceiling in this cube (which for creatures only excludes griselbrand and maaaaaaybe iona) does end up excluding more enchants though, such as recurring nightmare, phyrexian arena, and (shudder) no mercy.

-re. gold section this is an interesting question you guys have w/r/t pick order. i haven't noticed people getting cut due to their opponents hoarding mono-color cards before, and i'm guessing the reason has something to do with how high the gold cards are picked. (also, there's little time to do this kind of defensive drafting when fixing and spells are coming by most every pick -- the gold drafters do end up agonizing too, i can heartily attest myself!) i'll add that there seems to be a parity between all the colors, as well as between 1-2- and 3+-color decks, and this kind of dynamic tension is imo a healthy thing for a cube to have.

thanks again for your feedback, it's a great thing to have to reflect upon the creative process here and articulate my thoughts. that being said, my justification for the gold section being that way is 'it's fun,' and i encourage you guys to give it a try, it's more fun than it looks!

CML

[Jason Waddell]

I agree that gold drafting is fun (look at the popularity of Ravnica, Alara, etc.). The main reason "traditional" cubers have kept to a lower density is that the speed of an environment is determined by (among other things) the ratio of fixing to gold cards. There's a reason why sets with a gold focus provide a much greater emphasis on fixing. Naturally, in a cube we want to ensure, to avoid dragon Magic, that the fixing we include is playable by aggro colors. Overloading on gold cards without an appropriate density of fixing would be much more problematic. 

This all kind of falls into another one of those big fallacies that is perpetuated in cube design. People want to keep fixing down to avoid "multi-color good stuff", then they complain about aggro not getting proper support (duh, you just cut its fixing). If you want to avoid generic "good stuff" decks, maybe it's the "good stuff" you should be attacking first. If it's your sworn duty to power maximize above all else, yeah, you're going to run into problems. 

The design of any draft environment has many interconnected knobs that affect how the environment performs. Many cube designs set their "density of context-independent good stuff" knob to 11 then try to balance their environment from there. 

[Christopher Morris-Lent]

jason -- i'm very much with you on this, my other friend in town who has a cube (720) was adamant that he ought not add more fixing (~12% density?) because he didn't want his cube to 'degenerate into the 4-color good-stuff decks you see in standard right now.' let's break down that statement:

1. the mana-bases would be impossible; at ~8.5 non-basics per drafter available in my cube, assuming around 7 per player make it, then that's still around 10 basics per deck; the 4c midrange decks in this block get color-screwed with 100% non-basics of a slightly higher average power level than cube lands;

2. you'd still have to use picks on the non-basics, leaving other archetypes open for the other players;

3. even if it were a possible archetype and 1-2 people per draft could pull it off, the 4c midrange decks in standard are not good, at least not oppressively good;

4. so why is he afraid of his cube turning into that, despite no evidence that it would and plenty to the contrary? 'conventional wisdom,' i guess, which would explain why he fumes that 'nobody drafts aggro even though aggro is supported'; aggro decks are so, so bad in his cube, because of the lack of fixing;

5. he's a smart dude who's just seeing this in terms of false heuristics;

6. so we've gotta have this forum and keep on ranting, because we're right and 'conventional wisdom' is wrong.

other points: 

re. 'interconnected knobs' i agree that cube design (like set design or constructed-deck design) is too complicated to be reducible. though with the language and ideas we have here and in your articles, we go a long way towards describing how design affect the cube experience, it's still not all-encompassing. why do i have such a gross imbalance in my gold section? i tried it, and it was really fun! why does it work? that's an interesting question i want to explore further. how could it be better? i have some ideas ... anyway, it's this kind of thought process that keeps me playing this game.

re. 'good stuff' i also agree that maximizing power level is a poor design principle. i will say this, though. in the cube's infancy i had a bunch of one-drops and had declined to include elspeth, gideon, upheaval, wurmcoil, and other cards that are (a) infuriating in general and (b) an aggro deck almost never beats. yet aggro was still terrible, and i thought this was due to a bunch of spells i had in there that 'hosed aggro.' it turns out there were a few of these (i strongly recommend nobody include recurring nightmare in any cube), but not nearly as many as i'd thought. bringing aggro 'up to speed' was more a matter of adding more fixing and revising the existing fixing to be more aggro-friendly than it was a matter of shit-canning board wipes. as aggro flourished, i added these cards back in, and now there are only a handful of cards i keep out explicitly because they hose aggro, far fewer than i thought were initially problematic. this dynamic tension makes the cube a lot more fun: as opposed to either "aggro deck curves out" or "control deck counters and kills everything," the games are more likely to be back-and-forth, with tough decisions and exciting comebacks.

i do exclude many cards from cube because they ruin control mirrors, though. hello, sphinx's revelation! get out, and stay out!

the first principle i want to identify is that 'power level' and 'fun' are positively correlated up until a certain point, for both cards and decks. i think we agree that conventional cubes take the power level of cards too far and the power level of decks not far enough. based on a few of your pieces on CFB (mainly the reanimator one) i think you might want to try to push your cube and card power level a little further. for cards this could mean adding in stronger reanimator targets like woodfall primus or maybe another sweeper or planeswalker or other mid-range / control card or two. for cube (i guess i mean for aggro) this would almost certainly mean having a higher density of fixing.

in other words, you can calibrate control's power with spell choices, but for aggro it's mainly a function of fixing density and power-level.

last question: do you think it would be possible to design a powered cube that played like one of our current ones?

CML

On Friday, April 12, 2013 1:23:52 PM UTC-7, Christopher Morris-Lent wrote:

[Jason Waddell]

There are certainly tweaks to the reanimator package that could be made. Currently it's out of my cube entirely, but the changes proposed in Cube Fallacy did produce a much better experience than the traditional reanimator package. I will say, I'm still a bit skeptical about the fundamental gameplan of "putting a massively large creature into play early and hoping to ride it to victory", as I don't think it leads to great Magic in a draft environment. 

Aggro vs. Control is indeed much better when control is playing spells off the bat.

For a powered cube I would lean heavily on Vintage as an example of how to do things. Like, warp the entire environment around the presence of super good artifacts. I would probably break singleton in all sorts of places, and it would likely have little resemblance to my current cube. 

Regarding fun and power level, I think it's much more involved than a simple spectrum. The main reason I hate Wurmcoil is because it doesn't produce much fun for its power level. When I win with it, I don't feel excited, I feel apologetic. Brainstorm is an insanely powerful spell, and it produces quite a bit of fun for its caster without taking any away from the opponent. It all comes down to the design. Power level is a component, but it's not the only thing. A lot of these things are relative. Pack Rat can be an absurdly unfun card in RTR, and a cute inclusion in a cube. 

To tie into another discussion, Gattock Teeg has been a fun card because it alters the rules of the game and forces the control deck to figure out another path to victory. It's also exactly what my GW decks often want, to delay a board-wipe or Planeswalker from hitting the table. Casting it on curve isn't terribly difficult either (in my cube at least). In fact, casting it on Turn 3 is sometimes preferable to casting it on Turn 2 anyways. Every other color has access to good anti-control cards (red has Land Destruction, black hand disruption, blue counterspells), so I find Teeg to fill an important gap in my color pie. I can see arguments against it, but I'd rather not just dismiss it as "not a cube card".  

Another element to consider is that the "low power" draft environments are often "low decision density" environments, but they don't have to be that way. You could design a more interactive game around lower power cards while simultaneously ignoring New World Order. There are confounding variables at play here. Power is often correlated with interesting and splashy effects as well. It's the interesting cards that we find fun, not necessarily the power. There are plenty of efficiently-costed vanilla creatures that aren't really that fun. I could imagine a version of Magic built from the ground up with a lower power level than my cube in mind, with an eye towards trying to maximize fun in the creation of each card. Maybe this version of Magic would be more fun than my current cube. 

[Christopher Morris-Lent]

the nice thing about reanimator in cube is that it's not 'all-or-nothing' in the style of the legacy deck. (i dunno how much legacy you play, but the deck is really powerful and really unstable -- it can mull to 3, a lot, and then win from there) -- it's more like gwb rites in standard where you have a lot of different angles of attack and resilience but are not likely to put in that fatty before turn 4 (and if you do, it can still die, and if they kill it, you can still win, but so can they ...) imo it's a rich and interesting archetype that jives well with dredge (all sorts of fun), ramp, tokens, and other sub-archetypes

[Rob Dennis]

just getting around to comparing yours to mine (http://tappedout.net/mtg-cube-drafts/cuesbey) over on http://cuesbey.com

some section by section comments:
white:
surprise includes (curious how they're doing):

• blind obedience
• Marshal's Anthem
• Galepowder Mage (at least without flickerwisp)

could have included given your other choices (wonder if you intentionally kept them out)

• windbrisk heights (given the squadron hawks and frontline medic showing you're at least a little pro-battalion)
• flickerwisp/fiend hunter/leonin relic-warder if one of your stated themes is white weenie ETB effects

Blue
surprise includes (curious how they're doing):

• callous oppressor
• vexing sphinx
  
• cloudfin raptor (given how spell heavy you appear to be since you're supporting delver)
  

could have included given your other choices (wonder if you intentionally kept them out)

• seems like you might be interested in Attunement if you have as much graveyard stuff as you do, although perhaps not as interesting thanks to not triggering delver

Black

surprise includes (curious how they're doing):

• Liliana of the Veil (if only because you seem very light on PW other sections, I wonder if you feel she sticks out)
• Bloodchief
• victimize
• reckless spite

could have included given your other choices (wonder if you intentionally kept them out)

• more black discard outlets (putrid imp/pack rat), although perhaps you intend to dredge
• nekrataal/skinrender since you have bone shredder/shriekmaw, I assume you felt like there was a limit on the number of these you wanted
• consuming vapors (given you have only one other edict and you do have some pay life for resources stuff)

Red

surprise includes (curious how they're doing):

• Furystoke giant
• stigma lasher
• pyreheart wolf
• pulse of the forge
• hellspark element as the only temporary guy (and not keldon marauders/hell's thunder/ball lightning, etc)

could have included given your other choices (wonder if you intentionally kept them out)

• torchfiend/manic vandal since you're running tin street hooligan
• not really a card, but overall seems relatively light on haste creatures at 3-5 CMC and wondering if that was a specific choice.

Green

surprise includes (curious how they're doing):

• scute mob
• hermit druid
• borderland ranger (over the 'put land directly into play' elves)
  

could have included given your other choices (wonder if you intentionally kept them out)

• maybe lotus cobra given you do care about land drops and I haven't seen it be super overpowerd
• anti-enchantment/artifact creatures aside from acidic slime (stomphowler, sylvok replica); in fact white/red/green all seem light here (i guess because your artifact section is smaller and you're not running the super powerful equipment)

artifact general comments:

• I can get down with less overall, but I am surprised to see mortarpod gone
• I feel like a mimic vat is the right level of powerful/fun for what you're going for?
  
• you run a lot less fetch lands relative to cube size than I would have expected seeing both sensei's divining top and scroll rack
  

multicolor general comments:

• definitely seems like an eclectic mix, and while I feel like it'd be awesome, I'd need a few reps with your cube I think before I really could get a feel for the asymmetries there (e.g. I'm in U/R so don't expect much gold support compared to R/B)
  

[Christopher Morris-Lent]

new changes:

in:

noxious revival

stonecloaker
wildfire
terastodon

mortarpod

flayer of the hatebound

duress

out:

plated geopede

bloodhall ooze

skirsdag high priest

jotun owl keeper

cloudfin raptor

burning-tree shaman

vinelasher kudzu

[Christopher Morris-Lent]

hey rob, thanks for the input. in the interests of time i'll try to answer briefly:

INS

blind obedience — great card for aggro decks, very bad in control (possible cut)

marshal’s anthem — mediocre anthem plus mediocre recursion makes a sweet card everyone wants, i love it

galepowder mage — one of my favorites, complements venser pw for repeatable blink

callous oppressor — i like control-magic effects powerful but fragile (sower), i’m a big fan

vexing sphinx — terrific creature and reanimator enabler (discard outlet)

cloudfin raptor — cutting, it didn’t work out

liliana of the veil — really fun, actually one of the worst walkers since her power is tied directly to the power of her format, so she’s the nuts in legacy and modern but merely good in cube. discard outlet + edict all in one too (noticed you were looking for more of those)

bloodchief ascension — too early to say, with dredge and mill theme though probably quite good (certainly preferable to sygg, river cutthroat)

victimize — universally beloved

reckless spite — really awesome

furystoke giant — terrific 5-drop, could rotate in and out. worse than siege-gang but roughly as good as, say, thundermaw or thunderblust, and far more interesting

stigma lasher — might cut, but red does need 2’s and he’s sometimes very good

pyreheart wolf — universally beloved

pulse of the forge — i love this card

hellspark elemental — kinda meh since cube aggro is never burn. i’m soliciting suggestions for red 2’s

scute mob — fantastic

hermit druid — dredge theme

borderland ranger — i could do farhaven or wood elves, but i wanted a little more fat for green 3’s. people really like this card, well worth the slot imho

gold section — still fiddling with it. i won’t say it’s perfect or even ‘precise’ but i will say it’s ‘accurate’ and one thing that makes me proud of my cube

OUTS

windbrisk heights — it’s in already

flickerwisp, fiend hunter, leonin relic-warder — wisp is ok, i could try it again (i do love eventide and 187s). fiend hunter is mechanically interesting but kinda bad. relic-warder is a sweet card but my group didn’t want it anymore; the WW cost is a big liability in a gold cube

attunement — thought about it, never tried it though. i have tried magus of the bazaar (given the glut at 3cmc for blue this is my preference + it’s more powerful) but i took it out since it sucked outside of dredge. cryptologist and looter il-kor are my favorites for this effect

putrid imp, pack rat — pimp is too weak, pack rat would either be too weak or too strong and therefore (i think) no fun. i want 1-2 more discard outlets but since reanimator always has blue (compulsive, thirst, search, looters) and black has prowler and lili these are imo not worth adding.

nekrataal, skinrender — out for curve issues. typical cubes have way, way too many cards at cmc4. shriekmaw is 2 and shredder is 3 and they both play better with graveyard themes cuz they bin themselves

consuming vapors — sometimes i rotate it in, i do love this card a lot.

torch fiend, manic vandal — too bad to include

R haste creatures cmc3-5 — there’s a few in the gold section (ram-gang, aristocrat) on top of sparkmage, hellrider, red hero, zealous, i think it’s enough that i don’t need more. again i find thundermaw and thunderblust uninspiring and they’re both just worse than sgc

lotus cobra — excluded not because it’s too good but too bad. who wants a 2-mana dork when the upside is 10/405 fetches and not 12/60 and the downside is you just played a piker that makes no mana when you miss land drops?

indrik stomphowler, sylvok replica — see comments on fiend, vandal. with qpm, wickerbough, slime, thornscape battlemage in addition to putrefy, mortify, abrupt decay, vindicate, maelstrom pulse, trygon predator, i’m happy with the amount of art/ench hate i have, though cutting duergar hedge-mage may have been wrong

mortarpod — trying it this time, has in the past been underwhelming

mimic vat — have tried it before, nobody played with it, but will try it again if badgered enough

fetches beyond 10 — i’d like to (maybe go to 15 with 2x of each ZEN one to support enemy colors?) but i like all the fixing already and there’s a ton of it

[Dom Harvey]

Other cards that stand out a bit:

Angel of Despair

Dimir Guildmage

Rhox War Monk

Shambling Remains

Wash Out

Seize the Soul (I had this one for a while and desperately want it to be good enough, but it proved to be subpar. Time for me to reconsider?)

[Christopher Morris-Lent]

hello everyone,

i am contemplating cube in an altered mental state.

angel is just so wonderful.

dimir guildmage is the best of his kind. azure mage effects have been close to constructed-playable pretty recently. rakdos guildmage is better, though!

rwm is sweet, if multi-colored aggro is a thing dorky bant should have a card against them. maybe i should cut it but nah i like fat green dudes

shambling remains is the standard powerhouse hellhole flailer with flashback.

wash out may be too good or too bad. highly variant cards are bleh, i want to try it for awhile

seize seems really good to me, though maybe i could have both that and consuming vapors. black should have lots of removal spells.

[Christopher Morris-Lent]

i'm going to put in more huge creatures, everyone loves those!

[Christopher Morris-Lent]

in:

flickerwisp

hostility

loxodon warhammer

elspeth tirel

darkblast

liliana vess

innocent blood

snuff out

terastodon

protean hulk

borborygmos enraged

out:

ultimate price

ohran viper

marshal’s anthem

olivia voldaren

life from the loam

blind obedience

ninja of the deep hours

wonder

murderous redcap

fiery justice

disfigure

[Eric Chan]

Yes, Darkblast! I made the Disfigure -> Darkblast swap a few months ago, and couldn't be happier. So many neat, subtle interactions from that sweet little card.