Pulp Nouveau — A Tribute to Drafting Basic Lands

If there is a single distillation of the experience of Magic deckbuilding and gameplay, it is Cube Draft. Combine the game’s fundamental effects with the blank canvas of a draft, unshackle that experience from an attention economy, and a primal mix of analysis and risk-taking emerges.

But what happens if the novelty of Limited has worn off? What if opening a pack with power, history, and nostalgia isn’t as magical as it once was? Perhaps it’s time to up the stakes, and Cube is just the place to do it…

Take Magic’s most foundational assumption – the guarantee of unlimited basic lands – and rip it into shreds; light it on fire. It won’t help where you’re headed.

Introducing Pulp Nouveau: a new twist on land-restricted cubes, an environment where the only freely available basic land is Swamp.

Soon to be featured at CubeCon 2023, Pulp Nouveau is my tribute to the long tradition of land-restricted Limited. I’ve loved the way this high-stakes format recontextualizes Cube design and Magic gameplay, but getting here was no easy challenge. To mark the trail for other aspiring land-restricted cube owners, I’ll trace the history of land-restricted cubes and the design story of Pulp Nouveau.

CubeTutor user “loxodon_meyerarch” created the first land-restricted cube, Corince Desert, in the mid-2010s. Corince had a singular devotion to the flavor that Desert implied, themes of harshness and scarcity. In this list you’ll find 16(!) copies of Desert, Kindle, and other key cards; disproportionate representation of ; and themes of sand, oases, and aridness. But Corince prioritized its theme of Desert so seriously that it even redesigned the very mechanics of Limited. In the Corince Desert, every land must be drafted, even the basics. During the draft of Corince’s 432 cards across three 18-card packs, drafters would find that nonbasics were often inefficient or painful, highlighting the quality of basic lands. Thanks to Corince, a “desert cube” has come to mean harsh land restrictions, drafted basic lands, a penchant for card duplication, and gameplay defined by scarcity – all bound together by a single-minded pursuit of theme.

Though Corince established many design patterns for land-restricted cubes, subsequent designers continue to innovate. For one, designers have broken the mold of Desert as a theme, instead building around wintry dragons, artifact and Urza lands, and even, in a delightful twist, dessert. Other designers tweaked Corince’s template to fit four-player gameplay, travel-friendly two-player fun, and modern card pools in the spirit of the original. Most radically, some cubes have diverged from “true desert” in their land restrictions. The Devoid Cube gives out Wastes for free, but drafters must work to cast the namesake cards. Other cubes have embraced modal double-faced lands from Zendikar Rising, like the Amonkar Desert Cube.

This time last year, I was dimly aware of this rich history, but had never played a land-restricted cube myself. I didn’t know I’d soon be hooked… after a single draft.

It’s midway through CubeCon 2022, and I’ve just sat down with seven strangers to draft the Amonkar Desert Cube. I quickly narrow down my first-pick options to Magmatic Channeler or Living Death. In a traditional cube, I’d be tempted to pick the high-upside bomb, but in this context, I suspect that Channeler’s ability to mitigate mana screw and to punish slow starts gives it an edge. Just a few picks later, I see Queen Marchesa, and speculate on the

The gameplay of Amonkar was some of the most tense, rewarding decision-making I’d ever experienced in Magic. The land-restricted draft rewarded a balance between synergy and consistency, and the modest power level allowed new games pieces to shine, like Irencrag Pyromancer and Baird, Argivian Recruiter. After a single draft, I knew that when CubeCon ended, I’d have to try my hand at land-restricted cube design.

There was just one problem with my grand plan to build a Desert Cube: I didn’t own any Deserts! What’s more, Corince’s and Amonkar’s arid theme didn’t fit the cards for which I wanted to find a cube home: well-designed but lower-power game pieces I’d been collecting like so much pocket lint. When I considered those “pocket lint” cards as a whole, the metropolitan, chiaroscuro tones of New Capenna and Strixhaven were tonally mismatched to the sunny climes of a desert.

Resonance matters in cube design. It wouldn’t do to call my cube “desert” and then present my drafters with alleyways, sewers, and skyscrapers. Making matters worse, most of my “pocket lint” was , mechanically ill-suited to synergize with Desert. It seemed like the land-restricted theme was at odds with the cards I already owned and loved.

Wait – why does a land-restricted cube have to include all five colors of basics? Why not provide one color in the basic land box, while the rest are drafted? For my cube, a basic land box full of Swamps made perfect sense, seeing as the gangsters and grifters on my favorite uncubed cards had an obvious affinity for Black’s fifth of the color pie. Free Swamps would heighten this flavor, suggesting that the other four colors could exist in this dangerous city, but had to fight for it tooth and nail. This gestalt shift enabled and harmonized all the disparate elements of my design: Gilded Age aesthetics, predominantly Black mechanics, and a land-restricted draft. Once I’d settled on a name to evoke this conflux of ideas, Pulp Nouveau was born. Then came the hard part: taking the idea from blank page to full box.

At time of writing, Pulp Nouveau contains 108/440 (25%) lands. Of these, 44 (10% of the list) are guild fixing. This cube is drafted in 3 packs of 18, like the original Corince, to give drafters about as many spells as they’d have in a regular Booster Draft pool.

Pulp’s proportion of lands is a smidge lighter than many Desert Cubes: two handy references are on 38% and 32% total proportions of land, respectively. Pulp Nouveau contains fewer lands because I’m giving Swamps out for free, but in every color but Black, I’m providing about as many color-producing lands as these referents.

There’s a broad range of viability here, since drafters will change their evaluation of lands to match their scarcity. Too few lands tempts mana screw; too many lands risks turning the Desert fun into “normal cube but with paperwork”. (Some designers, however, have leaned into high land densities to explore threat-light gameplay.) About one-third lands (about 30% of which are basic) is the historical sweet spot. Since Pulp Nouveau provides unlimited Swamps for free, I knew drafters would never fall short on total land count; they just needed enough non- color sources.

The texture of the lands themselves is another matter. Some Desert cubes seek to max out on unique lands, from Tarnished Citadel to Buried Ruin. However, Pulp Nouveau can’t entice drafters into playing lands weaker than a basic Swamp. The worst lands I can get away with are those that fix for non- colors (about Skyline Cascade-caliber). Add to this my distaste for manabase micromanagement during gameplay, and I end up with 4 of each nonblack ODY cycling land as the “worst” lands in the cube. I love the incentives of Lonely Sandbar & co.; they only mitigate mana flood when you’re not color-screwed, so they reward a disciplined manabase. Non-singleton copies of Ash Barrens and Uncharted Haven offer similar incentives, adding subtle but forceful hedges against the greedy 5-color drafter. I also play 10 of each non- basic land, streamlining this otherwise extremely novel draft format as much as I can. (If you’re counting, this makes 56 lands so far.)

For the dual lands, I’m on full cycles of bouncelands, shocklands, painlands, and checklands. I don’t want splashes to be totally free, nor do I want the consistency of fetch-shock manabases, but I want my lands to be appealing to read and pick (which hasn't always been the case in land-restricted cubes). The -aligned guilds get an extra painland in a nod to the relative desirability of Black spells. A handful of high-investment 5-color lands brings the total up to 108/440.

With a rough vision of which lands I’d include, I started choosing “keystone mechanics,” ways for my drafters to sculpt their manabase and create agency over variance. Many Desert cubes include Kicker, Cycling, or other workhorses that smooth out variance and help mitigate the worst-case scenarios of nonfunctional decks. Even with Pulp Nouveau’s free Swamps, I knew I’d need to offset the risks of a land-restricted draft:

• Lesson/Learn was an elegant, beautiful draft puzzle in its native Strixhaven, and Environmental Sciences was a huge part of that. The discard/draw modality of Learn cards also limits nongames.
• Surveil and Investigate fit perfectly with Pulp Nouveau’s noir flavor, while controlling the top of players’ libraries.
• Mana sinks include Unearth, Flashback, and Adapt, so that players won’t be tempted to skimp out on mana sources.
• Treasure tokens also offer bursts of color fixing from early-game setup to late-game splashes.

In all these cases, I emphasized mechanics that could plausibly fit within the noir, pulpy theme of this project. Professor of Symbology and Introduction to Annihilation became Indiana Jones seeking to “unearth” buried marvels ; Growth-Chamber Guardian became the weird body horror of Jekyll and Hyde and Nightmare Alley; In Too Deep and Thought Erasure became the private eyes of Sin City and Notorious.

Movie references may seem out of place in a Cube design article, but let me say again: resonance matters in Cube. Land-restricted drafts are uncomfortable and stressful for many, many drafters. To counteract this discomfort and create positive associations, Pulp Nouveau needs resonant flavor that feels uniting and inviting.

Flavor unites; it connects the dots between unfamiliar cards. Flavor nudges a drafter’s subconscious to expect as their sacrifice fodder the noir Unlucky Witness instead of the gothic Gravecrawler. Flavor leads a first-time drafter to expect Mari to have relatively robust support. Meanwhile, the aesthetic unity and appeal invite the drafter to suspend disbelief, to release themselves from their expectations of “regular” cube, to accept that the novelty of Pulp Nouveau comes with a little uncertainty and that’s okay.

After I’d set the “keystone mechanics” that would enable the land restriction of Pulp Nouveau, I could do the fun work of bridging the keystones to other synergies. These might not interact with Pulp Nouveau’s core manabase tensions, but they’d go a long way to increase replayability and make my drafters feel creative.

• The mechanic I was most excited to add was Madness, since Learn also functioned as a backdoor discard outlet.
• Once I locked myself into discarding for Madness, low-power reanimation and self-mill were easy additions.
• Light sacrifice synergies connected loosely to the existing graveyard-matters mechanics, with Emerge as a surprising flavor hit here.
• Separately, the cube’s flavor already wanted a bunch of Rogues and Angels, which led to some cheeky, incidental type-matters payoffs, including Party and Kaalia.

Pulp Nouveau’s emphasis on uncomplicated gameplay and deeply resonant flavor did come with a cost: the uppermost peaks of power level were unavailable to me. The last thing I wanted was for random bombs to invalidate all my carefully chosen game pieces!

Luckily, flavor itself provided a backstop against power creep. As an example, no matter how good Gravecrawler would be in this cube, necromantic "ghouls" are jarring next to the ancient mummies and alchemic monsters of Pulp Nouveau’s world. Being picky about flavor helped me set firm goalposts on power level.

I created an even more targeted backstop, too: a list of cards I considered “format-defining”. I chose 10-20 cards I wished to be the premier threats in my format, as if I was choosing what the Top 8 decklists of a Standard tournament would contain. For these apex threats to behave like a Standard-defining card, they should dodge many removal spells and provide more value than cards at similar costs. My next job was to make sure this held true.

The “Vindicate Test”, all Internet pedantry aside, contains the useful idea that a format’s viable threats can’t get too badly blown out by removal.

For Pulp Nouveau, I wanted my apex threats to be appealing value propositions, but not risk-free. I sketched out what this might look like using concrete examples.

This table isn’t a black-and-white rule, and it isn’t a scientific formula for cube design. It’s only intended for the specific goals of this cube. Even so, getting concrete and specific helped me make specific card decisions: Nahiri's Wrath is cheaper than the going rate for Pulp Nouveau’s board wipes, but its card disadvantage is a severe drawback. A card like Tragic Fall may kill most MV threats, but a little creative gameplay can help deal with reanimated threats. Growth-Chamber Guardian can outgrow and outvalue most removal, but there’s a window of time where it’s vulnerable.

Whew. Writing all that was a bit overwhelming. I can only imagine how Pulp Nouveau’s drafters will feel! An unusual set of mechanics and cards that aren’t prominent in Constructed is a recipe for confusion and distraction, even before you toss in a brand-new rule that forces a complete reinterpretation of the Draft.

I want my drafters to feel delight at this new puzzle, not distraction at unneeded complexity. So, I went through CubeCobra one day, filtering it by each mechanic that appeared in the list. Crew abilities? Aftermath? Blood tokens? All under the microscope. I ruthlessly cut one-off mechanics, especially those without self-explanatory rules text. There’s simply no attention to waste on reminder text when there are basic lands that need drafting.

I also added duplicates of many effects, partly to boost the rate of reminder text, and partly to hit my desired densities of basic effects. Removal was a big focus of this non-singleton effort. Because removal often resolves and then gets put into the graveyard, it’s not like singleton removal actually helps players have a better time. Redundancy significantly eases mental burden. (Nonsingleton removal also allowed me to better simulate the threat-vs-removal tradeoff in the table above.)

Now came the fun, scary part: playtesting.

When I first announced to my drafters they’d have to draft all basic lands except Swamps, I watched them carefully for a reaction. This was the moment of truth: was my new cube just a cheap gimmick, or a genuinely novel puzzle?

Luckily, their eyes lit with excitement, and as they tore into their first pack, I realized that Pulp Nouveau, underneath its aesthetic of grit and soot, had the gleam of buried treasure. It’s those emotions that I’ve responded to as I iterate Pulp, since they are often truer sources of feedback than 3-0 decklists and other statistics.

As we playtested, I cut power outliers and egregious Rube Goldbergs, experimented with different pack sizes, and added more removal, but mostly, I tried to listen to my drafters. Were they frustrated at a certain card or combo? Was the draft stressful in a bad or good way? Did they have fun?

As the drafts accumulated, I noticed patterns fall out of the drafts. Most decks were at least splashing , with most decks being 2-3 colors. I had feared that the relative abundance of Swamps would lead to stubborn drafters opting out of the land-restricted premise, but I found that Pulp’s half- gold cards naturally tempted players to expand their palette, as did the outliers in other colors. This helped drafts feel balanced and varied.

One might expect the high density of gold cards to incentivize the dreaded “5-color piles,” whereby one drafter picks as many lands as they see, color-screwing the other drafters as a side effect. But in practice, this is a rarity. Drafters will change their evaluation of lands if they notice the scarcity, so the “land hate-drafter” is ironically most likely to ruin only their own deck.

After more than a dozen drafts of Pulp Nouveau, I feel confident in the structural decisions of cube size (440-ish), pack size (3x18), and proportion of lands (~25%). I’m quite pleased with its lower power level and the freedom that gives me to fine-tune complexity and gameplay patterns. Most of all, I’m convinced that land-restricted Cube is a wonderful tool to relearn cube, Limited, and Magic itself. Removing the assumption of basic lands was full of insights for me, like a mechanic who disassembles an engine block to bolts and nuts to learn what makes the system work.

CubeCon 2023 will be the biggest spotlight yet for land-restricted Cubes, from dragons to deserts and everything in between; I’m delighted that Pulp Nouveau will be among them and that I’ve gotten to share its story here.

Thanks for reading, and may your basic lands be in first-pick contention.

A huge thanks to Austin “Bones” Hale for historical research and design notes.