MTG Cube

The Beast

Each player starts with 30 life and seven cards. Your opening hand consists of three lands from a shared land pile in the middle of the table, and four cards from your stack of cards. Your stack of cards consists of a bunch of cards from the Cube that are selected sight unseen. The Cube is randomized before anyone selects a stack of cards, so the cards you are playing with will likely be a mix of all five colors. The stack of land in the middle of the table is half basic lands and half nonbasic lands. If the lands in your opening hand do not allow access to at least two different colors of mana, you can draw three new lands and discard the old ones.

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Depends how skill intensive you’re looking for. You can actually do a reasonable booster draft or rochester draft with four people. You can also do two separate heads-up Winston or Winchester drafts and then play.

But if you’re looking for something crazy and ridiculously skill intensive, you can do the Fact or Fiction draft.

Here’s how it works: on your “turn” you open a pack, shuffle it, and reveal five cards. The player to your left splits them into two piles. You choose one, they get the other. Then repeat this process with 5 more cards with the person to your right, and then again with the last 5 cards with the person across from you. 

After your turn, the person to the left of you goes. Once it goes around the table, the person on the end “wheels” and it heads back counterclockwise. 

The only worthwhile Sphinx is Consecrated, and he can be a bit iffy depending on the cube.

As far as demons go, there’s Griselbrand, but he’s only good enough if you go all-in on reanimate and S&T archetypes, plus a couple super undercosted ones like Master of the Feast, but those aren’t as iconic feeling lol

I think Thundermaw Hellkite is really the only dragon who is worth it in a traditional cube.

And then Kalonian Hydra sees some use.

The only worthwhile Sphinx is Consecrated, and he can be a bit iffy depending on the cube.

As far as demons go, there’s Griselbrand, but he’s only good enough if you go all-in on reanimate and S&T archetypes, plus a couple super undercosted ones like Master of the Feast, but those aren’t as iconic feeling lol

I think Thundermaw Hellkite is really the only dragon who is worth it in a traditional cube.

And then Kalonian Hydra sees some use.

Izzet does something very different in this set - it attacks, and often.  Normally Izzet decks do something more offbeat like focus on artifacts or it’s a spell based archetype with supporting mechanics.  In Conspiracy, it’s definitely an aggressive archetype looking for ways to keep attacking with its dethrone creatures until they’re big enough to just outright win combat.  The deck is also very tempo-oriented.  You want to drop a bunch of dethrone creatures early and then back them up with removal and counterspells to keep getting in until you can start finishing people off.  Dethrone’s an all-new mechanic for Conspiracy and it’s definitely an interesting one to try and maximize. Between trying to maximize the amount of dethrone triggers you’re getting as well as making sure you attacks are meaningful, you get a lot of interesting tension and decision making.  

Best uncommons for this archetype:

Marchesa’s Infiltrator - decent dethrone guy that can keep your hand full while attacking

Marchesa’s Smuggler - seeder uncommon that does everything the deck wants

Treasonous Ogre - gives you a way to accelerate a bit, but more importantly gives you a way to decrease your own life total to get dethrone triggers again

Uncontrollable Anger - combat trick that also plays well into what you want to do with your dethrone creatures anyway

Wind Dancer - makes your dethrone guys much harder to block

Best commons for this archetype:

Grenzo’s Cutthroat - plays very well with the other combat tricks available due to first strike

Marchesa’s Emissary - comes down a little later but a great target for enchantments or equipment due to hexproof

Orcish Cannonade - clears out an early blocker, helps keep your life lower than someone’s, and cantrips

Traveler’s Cloak - cantrips through your deck while making your dethrone guy unblockable against one or more opponents

Wrap in Flames - keeping up to 3 creatures from blocking almost guarantees a solid attack, perfect for later when you want to get multiple dethrone triggers in a single turn

Manalink was an ability I was toying with. I think it has a lot of developmental and memory issues and in the end I wouldn’t use it, but I wanted to show off some of what I was looking at.

My issue was that unreliable mana sources are not very fun. (Rhystic Cave) but as a wholly supplemental sources it should be okay. It just makes it really hard for most people to plan their turns I suspect, which I think many players wouldn’t like. In fact though, it seems like its an effect an opponent SHOULD have a way to block out. Playing around with the idea, I have decided bringing back that restriction is the best course.

The downside is of course all the non-combat abilities will be lost. It still allows you to giant growth for a burst of mana, but it gives your opponent a fair shake at stopping it. Cards that grant trample or prevent blocking would be fun, and even one extra cog in a combo can take it from game-breaking to novelty.

Increasing the cost is also viable, but fundamentally its not very fun, and cost can’t really buy away certain kinds of broken-ness like I am worried about here. Ramp cards become much less useful/fun with an increase in cost. Some will need tweaking for sure though.

Alright that’s the same thing I’m currently running.

The first thing I recommend doing is just running up a list of what you want to have in the final cube, but that isn’t easy to do with no experience with the format.

The best way to decide what needs to be in the goal list is by looking at what you want to support.

You want monoblack Pox/Stax to be a thing? (Hint: If you want mono-B to be draftable, you do) That requires certain support cards. Natural Order? Different cards. Tinkersteel? Different cards again.

You don’t need to do this step immediately, but definitely keep in mind what archetypes you want as you go. (ex. I support Stax, UR Spells Matter, UW Blink, and soon Splinter Twin.dec)

Once you’ve got an idea of your end goal, you have to build it. Unfortunately, most people don’t have a set of fetches/shocks/OGs sitting around, so you have to start budget.

There’s a couple good ways to budget a cube:

Proxy it. I’m… not going into how to do this in public due to legal things. If you really want to go for this, message me about it. Pros: Very Cheap, Lets you run whatever cards you want. Cons: Not real cards.

Start with a CU/be. Look up a list for a pauper/peasant cube (I have a few I can recommend). One of these will usually run you about $300 if you have none of the cards, and they have a good amount of cards you’ll want in a traditional cube. From there, add rares from your collection/trades/purchases/etc. Pros: Have cube to draft throughout the process. Cons: Won’t always be balanced due to the nature of how you’re upgrading.

Just throw one together from cards you have now and upgrade. Pros: You have a cube throughout, No initial investment. Cons; Will not be balanced, Probably not the best draft experience initially.

Just save up and purchase the whole thing at once. I don’t think I need to elaborate on this one.

I'd also offer that you could do a quick cube by grabbing 24 booster packs all from the same set or block and tossing those together. It'll be as balanced as any draft, and at about $100 it is on the cheaper end of building a cube from nothing.

Now the real question is how many packs I should open. It feels like a waste to open them all without doing anything with most of them, so I want to save some behind for drafting.

I think I’m going to use this box as the start of a “draft pool” of packs. The idea (which I got off the internet) is that whenever you and your friends want to crack packs, everyone buys 3 packs and add them to the pack pool. Then draft out of the pool, taking whatever packs you want! That way you keep a supply of old and new packs to draft with, and the supply is constantly rotating. Chaos drafting!

The idea of the contraption card type hinted at on Steamflogger Boss really intrigued me so I decided to come up with my own. What I’ve got isn’t quite true to Steamflogger Boss, but I like it nonetheless.

As you can see, first we need to errata the second ability on Steamflogger Boss a bit so it works in regards to counters placed on contraptions instead of the idea of assembling contraptions as a game mechanic. So that’s not a huge departure from how Magic plays already. Nor is the use of Riggers to put assembly counters on contraptions. Things put counters on permanents all the time, this is just uses the assemble keyword to denote a specific type of counter and a specific type of permanent. This is more a nod to Steamflogger Boss’ original rules text than anything else. In fact, I could probably reword SFB to say, “If a Rigger you control would assemble, it assembles twice instead.”

What’s quite different from anything seen in Magic before is the contraption card type. First, contraptions have no mana cost. You cannot cast them from your hand. You have to get them into play in some other manner, namely with a Rigger’s ability, though there are other methods. Second, contraptions don’t really do anything at first. They’re just piles of scrap metal junk, like the junk ability says. Once you get enough assembly counters on them (that is, once your Riggers have worked on them enough to assemble them) they start to do useful things.

As I made these cards ideas just started flowing and I’ve come up with a few more mechanics to play with the contraptions as well as quite a few more contraptions. Dwindle, an anti-proliferate mechanic, would be a small sub-theme to help the loxodons fight the goblin contraptions. My concern is how many contraptions could conceivably show up at common? It’s a totally new card type and it doesn’t function like anything else. But as MaRo says, your theme usn’t your theme unless it’s at common. I’m just concerned that they’re generally too complex for common (the simplest is probably Junk 1 and the ability T: Deal one damage to target creature or player).