Cloned from Fires

Fires (of Invention) Cube (early alpha) but power-ish

I was inspired by fantastic and mind-bending cubes like Turbo Cube and Cascade Cube, and I figured that Fires of Invention would be give us a new and interesting environment that demands novel card evaluation during draft. Everyone will start the game with a Fires as an emblem in their Command Zone, and it cannot be disabled or interacted with.

Moreover, through a significant limitation on the choices players can make, Fires presents players with a compelling and unique set of decision-making challenges during all three phases of draft, construction, and play. Even within an archetype there will be distinct choices and optimal play will not always be obvious; e.g. an aggro player's T2 might be a choice between casting two bears, or a Rampant Growth into a 3-drop this turn and two 4-drops T3.

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Design principles and decisions

There are likely many ways to design this cube, but we primarily tried to make choices that would make for interesting challenges and not lead the draft or deck-building to feel too obvious or "on rails". We want the cube to have powerful (if not actually powered), dynamic, and fast gameplay; but also to have that gameplay diverge significantly from the norm. We tried to include or exclude cards from the list based on how they interact with Fires of Invention's abilities. The ones that made the cut are intended to highlight or play with an aspect of the emblem, and during draft, every card ought to be considered in the context of the emblem.

Archetypes

Without the standard color-pie restrictions for casting spells, we speculated that deck identities would center around different ways of using and abusing the emblem's abilities, and that's how we tried to build in themes and archetypes, most of which bleed into one another:

• always be double spelling
  • 2x on-curve aggro
  • spell-slinger double-spell value
• cast your spells and tap lands too
  • interesting activated abilities
  • equipment
  • kicker & friends
  • cycling
• hard landings
  • aggressive land ramp into bigger spells
  • land destruction as spell-denial
  • man-land beatdown
  • land-cycling
  • mdfcs
• what emblem? (ways of avoiding or ignoring, rather than working with it)
  • other alternative costs
  • token-generators
  • cheat
  • flicker

Rejected/missing effects

The emblem also makes some cards or effects that you might typically expect to see in a cube impossible, impractical, too slow, or simply downright overpowered. Some things you won't see in the list:

• lots of hasty, low-mv aggro (too obvious)
• free mana rocks (they use up a spell, and don't ramp the way the emblem wants, but one, two, or three cheap accelerants highlight how different the cube is)
• counterspells (you can only cast them targeting your own spells, so why?)
• surprise interaction (i.e. interaction eats a spell slot on your turn or is telegraphed on-board)
• beyond-mid-range decks (if a game goes beyond T8, we did something wrong)
• storm ('¬_¬)