Cube Synergy: A Users' Guide

In early 2019, during the early days of the Ravnica: Allegiance Limited format, two draft junkies broke the format wide open. It wasn’t because they abused bomb rares or better statistics. No, it was because Limited guru Ryan Saxe (and later, the streamer Deathsie) unlocked the potential of the humble common Clear the Mind. By using Dovin's Acuity and removal spells as an engine for life and cards, they could survive long enough to establish a loop with two Clear the Minds, recycling their best cards and eventually decking the opponent. The deck revolved around fairly low-power commons and uncommons, so Clear the Mind drafters could pick powerful and highly desirable spells early, knowing that the basic infrastructure for the deck would go late.

Clear the Mind Control, as the deck became known, was one of the most popular and powerful decks in RNA, and the key to it all was the recognition of a single, uniquely powerful synergy. Powerful, novel synergy decks unite many beloved Limited formats, yet synergy itself is notoriously tricky for Cube designers. One common complaint is that a synergistic archetypes is failing expectations; another is that drafters are ignoring the intended synergies in favor of a “goodstuff deck.” Understanding how synergy works can explain why those undesirable patterns happen – and also how to fix them.

Synergy is a way to talk about how Magic cards improve drafters’ chances of winning. Assuming they’re playing to win, the first thing drafters do is maximize their cards’ rate, or their individual power. They pick Mother Bear over Grizzly Bears and Lightning Bolt over Lightning Strike.

When a combination of cards is more powerful than the sum of their individual rates, Mark Rosewater calls that synergy.¹ Rosewater summarizes the benefits of synergy, starting with how complex synergies can emerge from individually simple cards, masking a cube’s true complexity. When players discover these emergent synergies, that priceless feeling of discovery helps everyone feel like a winner regardless of their actual record. But the synergy also increases opportunities for skill and strategy, deepening gameplay.

Rate and synergy are not mutually exclusive. Every card in Magic has components of both, even the mighty Lightning Bolt, which requires synergy with -producing mana sources! A trivial example, yes, but it illustrates an important necessity of synergy:

Synergy requires multiple cards, and this creates risk. This is core to Magic’s game engine, from the mana system upwards. If you’re color-screwed, it doesn’t matter that Lightning Bolt is powerful. Likewise, if you fail to draw Stifle, or if Stifle gets countered, then Phyrexian Dreadnought is a very weak creature. Because synergies require interactions between multiple cards, they’re inherently riskier than a card whose power is mostly produced by raw rate.² The risk-reward calculus is a really fun part of Magic, but it also reveals a key tool to balance synergies in Cube.

Because synergies are risky, they must offer drafters more power than the next-best option on pure rate. Otherwise, the synergy will get drafted less and will win less. For example, if Clear the Mind’s RNA synergies weren’t powerful, Ryan Saxe would have just played a deck with less risk. Or, if the Stiflenought synergy only created a 4/4 creature, then deckbuilders would just spend their two mana on a safer creature.

The exact balance of risk and reward is extremely context-sensitive: even though synergy powerhouse Delver of Secrets is legal in Pioneer, Modern, and Legacy, only Legacy has (at time of writing) the Goldilocks-like circumstances to make Delver a competitive synergy deck.

But even though synergies don’t have a one-size solution, we can evaluate them individually using the tools of floor, ceiling, and investment. Here’s three more examples:

Brainstorm and fetchlands are a classic Eternal synergy. Its floor (worst-case scenario) is a a cantrip and a mana-fixing land, both desirable on their own. The ceiling (best-case scenario) includes hiding spells from Thoughtseize, shenanigans with Counterbalance and Miracle, and shuffling away situationally useless cards. Even though nothing in their text boxes explicitly name these play patterns, the Brainstorm/fetchland synergy is extremely powerful, and the only investment a player needs to reach that ceiling is to pick cards that most decks want anyways. Verdict: high floor, high ceiling, and low investment.

For our second example, I humbly submit the very first Magic combo I discovered: Searing Meditation and lifelinkers. Its floor was

Finally, the Equipment-matters theme of many Limited formats falls between the prior two examples. The ceiling of Limited Equipment synergies is often free equip costs and stat boosts, which won’t compete with Eternal powerhouses, but it’s respectable in most Limited formats. The floor is not sky-high, but Equipment are still respectable mana sinks. And every Limited deck wants lots of creatures, so it’s unlikely your Equipments will be dead cards, lowering the risk of the synergy.

If you find that your pet synergy archetype is going the way of my beloved Searing Meditation deck, you can use floor, ceiling, and risk to tune them up to snuff.³

To increase a synergy’s floor, signpost it using rate, not text box. If your Golgari synergy is Elves, then Vraska, Golgari Queen may be a more attractive signpost than Shaman of the Pack. Even though Vraska doesn’t say “elf” on it, her raw power will draw drafters into

To increase a synergy’s ceiling, make sure it can out-compete “goodstuff” decks. Even better, impose synergistic requirements on your cube’s power outliers: cut the synergy-agnostic Thundermaw Hellkite for Obosh, the Preypiercer, who requires huge synergistic investment but unlocks even greater power. (Not every power outlier needs to be that extreme, but building investment into your cube’s rate monsters can be a recipe for success.)

To make a synergy less risky, a few more tools are available:

• Make them lower investment: Threshold synergies require fewer enablers than synergies with unbounded ceilings. (They’re often more pleasant and dynamic to play with, too.)
• Add redundancy: The easiest ways are to break singleton or add functional reprints on key components of a synergy. But many broad synergies, like +1/+1 counters or graveyard-matters, can easily be implemented in singleton.
• Depower removal spells: This is a topic all its own, but weakening a cube’s removal suite can allow synergies more breathing room.
• Cross-pollinate: By providing many possible ways to use a single synergy piece, you decrease the risk of picking it during draft. (For example, Scavenge is explicitly useful to counters-matter and graveyard-matters decks, and implicitly useful with many other synergies.)
• Think outside the box: Most official Magic sets have 10 guild pairs and, in the name of simplicity, 10 corresponding synergy decks. If you’d rather bridge a single archetype across multiple guilds, more complex cards can make that happen!

Synergy and rate are two ways Magic players build powerful decks. Synergy is tricky to design into a cube, since it always incurs risk, but when it’s harmonized with a cube’s rate-based cards, it makes for a fun, repeatable draft experience full of novel decks and hidden pockets of discovery. Good luck, and may your drafts be full of synergistic surprises!