Art by Cornelius BrudiFeatured at CubeCon 2024!
The GOAT Peasant Cube is a singleton cube featuring only cards that have been printed at Common or Uncommon. It is a synergy driven environment with an emphasis on counters and tokens, especially trinket artifacts like Food, Blood, Treasures, and Clues.
It is meant to be drafted with 6-8 players. For 6 drafters, 4 packs of 12 cards is preferred. With 7+ drafters, 3 packs of 15 cards.
The number of cards that can take over a game or give you a “2 for 1” on their own is limited. Instead, this environment pushes players to combine cards to create value and build powerful engines.
The color pairs are set up so that each can do more than one thing. Most cards in the cube fall into one of the four major pillars - Tokens, Modified Creatures, Artifacts, or Graveyard Matters. I'll highlight some of the different strategies available with a few of the key cards.
Tokens & Sacrifice
Go-Wide Aggro
Food
"Game Objects" aka Amassing Tokens Bogles-Style Aggro with Auras
+1/+1 Counters Spell-Based Heroic Artifact Aggro
Artifact Sacrifice Amassing Artifacts Animating Artifacts Self Mill Value
Discard/Madness "Cards Leaving the Graveyard"Some other minor themes are:
Amassing Enchantments
The Lost and the Damned Pixies Small ReanimatorIt is often necessary to combine two or more of these strategies in one deck. There are a lot of "glue" cards available that will allow drafters to do this relatively seamlessly.
I was inspired to create this cube after playing Caleb Gannon’s Powered Synergy Cube when it was featured on Magic Online. Curation has also been heavily influenced by Matt Grenier’s “A Study in Harmony” cube.
I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could design a Peasant environment that felt and played differently from the standard Peasant Cube experience of Flametongue Kavus vs Mulldrifters.
There are no “free spells” in the cube, so you won’t find Force of Will, Daze, Pyrokinesis, etc.
While this cube pushes you to find synergies, there are no infinite combos.
I was lucky enough to be featured on the Recross the Paths podcast to chat about this cube. You can listen to that episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5nEaEnupidrY5EUjDMVOI8?si=ddjsAU3MQLaOBUCCkWcWXQ
This cube is completely foiled out for the cards that have a foil version. (Hey Wizards, I would buy my first secret lair if you created foil versions of the Clue cards.)
The basic lands are the foil Rebecca Guay Standard Showdown lands.
- Revitalizing RepastLounge
- Glasswing GraceBallroom
- Skyblade's BoonSage's Reverie
- Dormant GroveTear Asunder
- Cache GrabGrapple with the Past
- Inverted IcebergMnemonic Sphere
- Chart a CourseThirst for Knowledge
- Shrapnel BlastBottle-Cap Blast
- Torch the TowerLightning Bolt
- Ral and the Implicit MazeBig Score
- Pyrite SpellbombExperimental Synthesizer
- FireboltGalvanic Blast
- Witch's MarkPyroclasm
- Ian the RecklessShao Jun
- Ghost of Ramirez DePietroTaigam, Sidisi's Hand
- Masked VandalRuby, Daring Tracker
- Back for SecondsHero of the Dunes
- Monstrous RageIntegrity // Intervention
- RecommissionCogwork Librarian
- Oni-Cult AnvilStormclaw Rager
- The Aesir Escape ValhallaVolt Charge
- Staggering InsightEphara's Enlightenment
There are a handful of cards that caught my eye in the Final Fantasy set, but I haven’t really thought about what changes I want to make for them yet. Stay tuned on that, I suppose.
Most of the changes with this update were made with the goal of continuing to slow the cube down. I also wanted to expand the gold section again because there are some nice cards I’ve been missing.
There are a decent number of changes in Red. Monstrous Rage got axed. It’s a great card no doubt, but it doesn’t always lead to the most interesting games. A lot of the other changes are turning knobs on the red burn suite. Galvanic Blast feels like it should have always been in here. I was reluctant to have this card and Shrapnel Blast in at the same time due to concerns about too much reach/face burn. Speaking of Shrapnel Blast, I’m cutting it for Bottle-Cap Blast. They are both 5 damage burn spells, but Bottle-Cap has some more interesting applications since it can create treasures.
Some of the other changes were made to reduce the number of double sided cards or cards that create unique tokens in order to bring overall complexity down a little.