Art by Kev WalkerThis cube originally allowed players to add cards from Canadian Highlander's Points List to their decks after drafting. Realizing that these cards are broken mostly because they are radically undercosted, I decided to see what it might be like if any card could be broken, so this cube now has the following rule:
Set aside the first three noncreature nonlegendary spells you draft. As you build your deck, you can reduce their costs or the costs of their activated abilities by a total of six mana of any color, distributed as you please, as long as you do not change the color identity of any card.
That's it! You want Ancestral Recall? Go get Jace's Ingenuity and apply a 4-mana discount to it. You'll still have two mana left to turn a Talisman into a Mox-like artifact.
Design PrinciplesThis cube is in many ways a pretty typical powered Vintage cube. Card inclusions are mostly the usual suspects, selected based on what's in other popular Vintage cubes (e.g., the MTGO Cube). I also looked at cards with high Elo ratings. A quick glance at the card list is unlikely to show anything new, and that is kind of the point.
However, this cube is doing a few things differently:
- Borrowing from Canadian Highlander, the Power Nine and other extremely powerful cards are available, but players must craft these cards from the cards they draft (see above).
- This cube has a rarity structure similar to a typical to retail limited. "Commons" show up in every draft, alongside half the "uncommons" and a quarter of the "rares." Each of these rarities plays a different role in the cube and when combined provide both consistency for the main themes and variety to the set as a whole.
- The rarity structure works only for groups of fewer than eight players, and this cube is designed with player counts of two to six in mind. For two, cut a color and do grid drafting or microsealed. For six, do a team draft and build 30-card decks.
- This cube is meant to be experimental and played on Cockatrice. As such, it is wholly focused on pricier cards. That's not hard to do as the cube follows the initial premise of cubes of old: include the most broken and powerful cards in the history of Magic. These cards tend to be pretty pricey.
- To maximize variety I do my best to adhere to a "collection singleton" constraint such that no card shows up more than once across all my cubes and decks. Since most of my projects are budget builds, following this rule has not been very difficult here, but there are a handful of cards I might have otherwise included but did not because they were already somewhere else, usually the Cockatrice Commander Cube.
- Mox Emerald
- Mox Ruby
- Mox Jet
- Mox Sapphire
- Mox Pearl
- Sol Ring
- Mana Crypt
- Black Lotus
- Time Vault
- Underworld Breach
- Demonic Tutor
- Tinker
- Ancestral Recall
- Flash
- Thassa's Oracle
- Time Walk
- SpellseekerSnapcaster Mage
- Mana DrainReshape
- Lórien RevealedJace's Ingenuity
- Mana VaultUr-Golem's Eye
- TimetwisterFlash
- Curse of OpulenceUnderworld Breach
- Chrome MoxBlack Lotus
- Lotus PetalMana Crypt
Elsewhere, I've been creating custom cards that answer the question "What if every color had cards as broken as Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, etc.?" That's been a fun process, but the ultimate lesson has been that these broken cards are for the most part doing fairly normal things at extreme discounts. (For example, Demonic Tutor is simply Diabolic Tutor for 
less.)
Rather than create a bunch of cards, why not allow any card in the cube be broken?
Instead of allowing each player ten points of a limited selection of cards, I'm adopting a new rule:
Each player sets aside the first three noncreature nonlegendary cards they draft. As they build their deck, they may distribute a discount of up to six mana of any color to these cards however they wish, as long as they do not change the color identity of any card.
(This is most easily implemented on Cockatrice, where you can create clones of cards an annotate them. Face-to-face, perhaps make a note of which cards you're modifying and share it with your opponent ahead of each match.)
Implementing this here, I'm moving the Points List to the maybeboard and swapping in fairly costed versions of these cards (e.g., Diabolic Tutor). Anyone can draft Diabolic Tutor and turn it into a Demonic Tutor, but they can also draft a Talisman of Hierarchy and turn it into a "Mox of Hierarchy" instead.
I can see this being a little anticlimactic, as many cards make it into cubes like this only because they're already cheap. Dropping something from two to one mana is not going to be a big deal, and there are plenty of 1-mana spells that would not be affected. Nonetheless, there are way more cards to break here than custom-made broken cards I made elsewhere, and I want to see how drafts can warp around your first picks automatically being completely bonkers in unexpected ways.
