The Self-Defeating Irony of Cube Conceits

Look, we’ve all been there. An itch to build a new cube: something unique, something attention-grabbing. An homage to your favorite playstyle. A filter to reduce the 40,000 Magic cards into a more manageable subset. (Maybe a one-word title, so that we can be the #1 Google search result for The {BLANK} Cube.) A little schtick, to lure in drafters and impress other designers.

Cube is sweet because it can be anything we want it to be, after all. There’s just one problem. The more we warp a cube around a single conceit, the more we incentivize our players to beat that theme. That’s the self-defeating irony of many cube conceits, themes, and schticks.

Why Conceits Are Self-Defeating: Scarcity

The most valuable cards in many draft formats are the ones that are 1) critical for a deck to function, and 2) in the shortest supply. They’re irreplacable, scarce.

When we insert a top-down mechanical conceit into our cube — whether that’s a favorite color pair or mechanic, a strategy like aggro or control, or an all-in gimmick like “oops all creatures” — our natural instinct might be to jam as many copies as we can find of that conceit, so that every player can build around our theme. If we do, guess what resource just became the least scarce? Yep, the exact thing that we were trying to make a pillar of our format.

Even worse, if a savvy drafter can expect most of their opponents to lean into the theme, then our cube’s scarcest resource just became whatever cards beat the conceit, the Rock to the cube’s Scissors.

This is why experienced drafters sometimes say that they habitually mistrust the Cube designer (or indeed, in the case of Retail Limited, they mistrust WotC R&D themselves). When the Cube designer says, “I built this cube around Scissors,” they’re really just announcing that Scissors is the most replaceable baseline pick, with a million options to go around. It’s the scarce Rocks that are the true MVPs.

Example 1: Changeling Cube and Retail Limited

Midwest cubehead Tim Myers has a cube where every creature has Changeling. In this cube, what’s the scarcest resource? Enablers (changelings) are a dime a dozen. Creature-type buffs are now universally adaptable, so those are easy to pick up, too. It’s reasonable to expect every battlefield to feature some cheap creatures with a Questing Beast’s worth of buffs.

But that very abundance makes both type-matters enablers and payoffs extremely replaceable. Worthy Knight may be the cube’s strongest payoff, but Inspiring Veteran isn’t too far off, and it’s way easier to pick up late.

Instead, it’s the removal that truly rules Changeling Cube. Wizard's Lightning kills a creature, with all the usual combat and tempo benefits, but it also breaks up the cube’s nasty — and omnipresent — creature combos. Removal is even more critical than usual, and therefore more scarce.

By committing fully to creature synergies, Changeling Cube makes anti-creature cards its most important resource. To be clear, all love to Tim (he’s well aware of this quirk, plus he’s won a CubeCon). And after all, even WotC can’t do any better in their official formats!

Magic is a game about creature combat, fundamentally. And yet, the average anti-creature card has always been a higher Draft pick than the average creature, simply because the latter is vastly more abundant.¹ Humble little Shock is very often near the top draft common, for cryin’ out loud.

Removal’s importance in Magic can be a feature or a bug, allowing designers to predict threat lineups, or creating space for graveyard synergies and proactive punishers. Either way, the reason removal matters so much is that it is the most natural counterplay to Limited Magic’s most abundant resource, creatures.

Example 2: Standard Cube and Tupelo Honey

One of my local cube ringers, D., curates a Standard Metagame Cube filled with the biggest bombs of recent years. Synergistic threats, as powerful in Commander as they are in 2026 Standard, dominate the lategame of this format:

Allowing your opponent to untap with six lands has never felt more terrifying. Better to steamroll them before that happens, making the Standard Cube’s powerful aggressive cards and removal the most powerful early draft picks possible. If Boros or Rakdos is an open lane at your seat, you’ll be able to punish all the greedy midrange decks.

At the furthest possible opposite extreme, another friend P. curates Tupelo Honey, a cube where every spell costs

or less. You’ll be able to guess the scarcest draft picks by now, I think…

Mana sinks are the undisputed king of Tupelo Honey. My guess is that Scavenging Ooze is the best overall P1P1 in this cube, and not just because it’s an all-time great. Scooze drives a fine-honed dagger straight between the scales of Tupelo Honey’s concept. It spends all the mana you ever draw; it outscales every other cheap creature; it even stymies the opponent’s graveyard grind engines.

So it goes all over the Cube world. The scarcest pick in The Artifact Cube is Naturalize. The scarcest pick in a mono-Black cube is the color-pie break. The scarcest pick in a janky 1997 Kitchen Table Magic cube is creatures with power and toughness. The scarcest pick in a cube where every land deals you damage is Lifelink. When everybody is throwing Scissors, the smart ones go for Rock.

Variety is the Spice of Strategy

Overabundance is one mechanism by which draft metagames degenerate, ironically giving all the importance to the abundant strategy’s exact opposite.

Diverse decks, on the other hand, are the foundation of dynamic metagames. If Rock beats Scissors too often, then throw some more Paper into the mix! Now Rock has a natural predator, and Scissors is less likely to cannibalize itself. Even better, add a couple more hand-signs to really shake up the RPS food chain, and next thing you know, we’ll have reinvented Magic’s color pie.²

Take, for example, my own cube, which in 2020 was a “mono midrange” experience, full of strong  

-drops to emulate Jund mirrors. To my chagrin, its most valuable cards, draft after draft, were the grindiest, least midrangey engines available, often playing four or five colors to avoid playing anything aggressive. I had cannibalized midrange by making it overabundant, a format full of Scissors with no Papers to snip.

Having exhausted all my other options, I’ve recently been juicing Blue control decks, beefy Green ramp, and quirky combo decks. And I gotta tell ya, scout’s honor, I still hate playing these decks. Counterspell? Blegh. Gag me with a spoon. What I do like about Blue Control is that it offers easy prey for my cube’s Aggro decks, because that gives my beloved midrange a reason to exist in a leaner, meaner configuration.² Abundance wasn’t the solution I needed — diversity was.

Diversity is Magic’s greatest strength as a game. It creates nested rock-beats-scissors networks of such complexity that they’re too difficult to solve at a single draft night. Fresh, strategically open, and endlessly replayable cubes begin here, with the bonus of a big buffet for your players to self-select their ideal kind of fun. Even if I’m a midrange sicko, I might be hosting players who feel that passionately about some other kind of deck.

This isn’t to say that a strong mechanical conceit is incompatible with a robust metagame. Nostalgia cubes, for one, certainly have strong mechanical identities, but nostalgia can fit a lot of decks inside it. My friend H.’s Paradox Cube is all about casting spells from outside your hand, but likewise, this is a broad enough schtick that it’s still possible to have tons of RPS-style cycles within that space.

We can also look to WotC-produced examples like Modern Horizons II or Ultimate Masters, which each perfectly blended several loud mechanical themes into a single Draft format (among them, artifacts, graveyard-matters, and actual factual Storm). With discipline in selecting cards that were in dialogue together, no dominant strategy emerged in either of these formats. If the format pillars are diverse, then it’s not possible to warp your deck around beating those pillars — better to join ‘em instead with a synergy deck of your own.

Scarcity rules the way that drafters prioritize cards and strategies. By understanding it, we can create diverse, replayable Cube metagames.

Thanks for reading, and may your favorite deck always have easy prey.