Design

Removal Vs. Synergies in Cube

October 27th, 2025 — Parker LaMascus

I have a friend who, in our early Magic-learning days, was incapable of casting a normal Doom Blade. That’s not to say he targeted my Black creatures, because at the time, I didn’t play any. It’s just that every casting involved three extra “O”s and fifteen extra decibels. “DOOOOOM BLADE!” was his battle-cry, his mantra, the harbinger of my every lunchroom loss.

It may come as a surprise, then, that thirteen years later Doom Blade and other removal spells are some of my favorite Cube design tools. Removal is a backstop against out-of-control synergies, but the chinks in removal’s armor also define which synergies can thrive. Harnessing that restrictive-and-permissive interplay of removal and synergy allows fine-tuned control of a Cube’s internal metagame.

How Interaction Works

Most interaction spells (or removal, or kill spells, or whatever you wanna call ‘em) work by reducing the amount of relevant game pieces the opponent has. When the size of the game decreases, it limits which synergies are viable.

A thought experiment: pretend you’re playing against an opponent who plans to cast Doom Blade on two out of every three creatures you play (they’re extremely lucky). Which of the following Goblin synergies are you most interested in?

Since synergies require interactions between multiple cards, removal spells can cause tons of splash damage. In the case of these four Goblins-matter cards, Gempalm Incinerator and Goblin King will be the most harmed by plentiful removal. On the other hand, Mogg Fanatic barely cares about removal (it’s cheaper than a Doom Blade, and can self-sacrifice for partial value), and Goblin Grenade only needs one Goblin to be active. Pashalik Mons falls somewhere in the middle, with some residual value against Doom Blade, but a ceiling that requires a big army to unlock.

This core dynamic is repeated over and over in Magic’s draft formats, including Cube: interaction tends to clamp down on synergy. Its ubiquity can give the false impression that removal and synergy are inherently opposed, but the truth is that the weak points of interaction imply which synergies can thrive!

These five variations on the Doom Blade formula look similar, but the differences between them incentivize different synergies. If you’re testing a Delver deck, a classic “small game” deck that throws the opponent off-balance with cheap pressure backed up by plentiful interaction, which removal spells look least appealing for this deck?¹ For me, it’s the slow, card-positive versions, which require more lands than my Dazes and Wastelands will likely allow. But the answer flips if we’re playing a “big game” deck like

Midrange that’s hoping to leverage its own critical-mass synergies.

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Hear Sam Black define big and small games on Lucky Paper Radio

Lucky Paper Radio Episode 143

Magic writer Sam Black introduced a distinction between big and small games in 2021 as a way to analyze card advantage. Big games are ones where both players have access to lots of resources, including mana, cards, and active permanents. These are the kinds of games where many synergies thrive, feeding off combinations of cards to yield super-linear returns. Small games are the opposite, low-resource games defined more by efficient use of resources than by attrition. Kill spells usually vote to reduce the game size, and that’s why they’re so good at disrupting big-game synergies.

But as we’ve seen, the texture of removal can vary widely for any type of interaction: counterspells vote for bigger and smaller games; discard spells vote for bigger and smaller games; O-Rings vote for bigger and smaller games; graveyard hate votes for bigger and smaller games. For Cube designers, this texture is how we can design successful synergies.

Synergies for Big and Small Games

Let’s return to our Goblins-matter example. Notice how the louder Goblin synergies correlate to votes for bigger games? Goblin King offers unbounded payoff (if you have 100 Goblins, he’ll give you 100 extra power) but also the lowest floor (a Gray Ogre on an empty battlefield). The super-linear combination of game text compounds the synergy’s strength. By contrast, the more modest, opt-in Goblin synergies like Mogg Fanatic tend to have less powerful ceilings but are more resilient in low-resource games.

Think about how differently you’d draft a deck full of small-game Mogg Fanatics versus one with several big-game Goblin Kings. You have a choice between Fireblast and Volley Veteran: which is more appealing for which deck? Your choice for a modest attacker is between Krenko's Command and Enterprising Scallywag: which deck can better leverage one extra mana versus one extra Goblin-typed creature? which deck is more likely to be putting permanents in its own graveyard?

All kinds of classic Cube decks express a preference for big or small games. Ramp decks combine cheap cards to cast huge threats with almost zero maindeck removal: a classic big-game deck. Rakdos Midrange may use its abundant interaction to vote for a small game and go under Ramp, but it will use Delirium and Delve to turn its graveyard into a relevant zone when it needs to grind big value. Classic Jund hardly wants want any big games at all, trusting a lone Tarmogoyf or Liliana to get the job done after the dust settles. Azorius Control votes small on the battlefield using Wraths, but needs a lot of lands and cards to turn the corner. Even Combo gets in on the fun, with a deck like Storm wanting access to its entire graveyard, and Stax trying to keep resources low. In every case, a deck’s preferred removal is intricately tied to its preferred game size.

Tuning Removal

The lesson: if you want a synergy to thrive, pay attention to the removal. Small-game decks and formats tend to trade down on resources in several ways. For instance, power-heavy statlines make combat trades more likely. Cheap, dense interactive spells – often card-nuetral or card-negative – prevent snowballing advantage, keeping total resources low. Even non-battlefield zones may be vulnerable to interaction. Meanwhile, mana chokepoints may impede the development of synergies, forcing decks to adapt to limited resources.

Other structural features of small-game decks and formats are as much symptom as cause: life chokepoints mean that players can’t deploy all their resources before the endgame arrives; fractional card advantage comprises a bigger fraction of the total cardboard, so these engines become more desirable; and the strongest synergies tend to be threshold-style instead of scaling-style, trading pure power for resilience against interaction.

Big-game decks operate in the opposite way: card-positive exchanges of interaction, card advantage mattering more than mana efficiency, and a preference towards synergies that keep scaling up with no limit (like our friend Goblin King). These are all incentives to keep as much cardboard in play for as long as possible.²

Choosing a Game Size

Big or small games? Why not some of both? With a diverse mix of removal, any cube can easily support both kinds of decks in moderation. That allows players to opt into their preferred playstyle – folks who love seeing Rube Goldbergs pop off might prefer big-game decks; players who’d rather lose than read the opponent’s cards can draft small-game decks; and so on.

More importantly, the big-small analytical framework can help diagnose your cube’s underperforming synergies. If a synergy isn’t up to snuff, it may be because its payoffs aren’t all voting big or small together, or because it votes big-game in colors whose removal only votes small, or because it’s a small-game deck fighting against 2025-era start-small-and-grow-enormous siege engines. Game size may not a game design silver bullet, but alongside your usual tools, it can unlock unique insights.

Thanks for reading, and may your games always be just the right size.