I knew the first draft of Cube: Legacy was going to feel odd for many reasons; a new format to work with, cards not everyone is aware of, cards reminiscent of your average Core Set, etc. With that said, I had no idea how exactly the second draft was going to go down. We all knew several cards to look out for, but how those cards would change and morph over the cube were (and still are) yet to be seen.

If you want to follow along with what the Cube looks like right now, the updated visual spoiler can be found right here!

We got to draft the Cube, and many hard-fought battles were had; a player drafted a dedicated mill deck, while another went deep into the fledgling Morph archetype. A player won a game by casting Air Elemental with the sticker “ETB target opponent draws two cards” when their opponent had no cards left to draw. Someone played Faith of the Devoted as the sickest anti-Liliana tech I’ve ever seen.

In the end our winner was not a Tormod’s Crypt-based combo deck like many of us had feared, but instead a Red-White value deck containing both Fiend Hunter and Mark of Mutiny, both of which had been passed to him.

Players had much more incentive to Scar cards this draft, as we had made some pretty silly cards by the end of our first play of the format, as documented here. And if you’re interested in the list we’re using for Boons and Scars, it’s all right here.

As you can see, some busted cards got brought into line like Mark of Mutiny and Fiend Hunter, and some reasonable cards got unfortunate lines of text, like Hunt the Weak and Banishing Light.

Prey Upon looks really awkward, and really pushes upon the limits of an experiment like this. I’m not sure what the best formatting for editing spells should have been, and I’m not really a fan of how this looks personally. I have a lot of ideas for down the line where things like this can go, but for now I’ll keep them to myself until I can make sure they’re serving the ultimate goal of all of this – Fun.

We added some number of Boons to the Cube as well, with some pretty silly cards being made.

So we managed to make 1-mana Wrath of God (that needs an enchantment on the battlefield to even cast), 8-mana infinite turns, a 2-drop cantrip Birds of Paradise, and more! These cards are beginning to gain nuance, as the majority of players adding Boons to cards this time around expressed caution as they didn’t want their cards to be too good for fear of Scars ruining them by the end of the next draft. This surprised me, as I had assumed players would rather take the 1-in-8 gamble of opening a busted card than just making value cards, but I don’t blame them as seeing their creations live to see another day is a noble cause.

At the end of each draft we take out the last-picks and give all but one card of each color Morph or Cycling. Here are the results of that process.

To preemptively answer your question, Tibalt technically doesn’t work with Morph, as he would get turned face-up with zero Loyalty counters, however I decided it’d make for a more appealing card if it did. Past that, these are all pretty tame but definitely good progress for the Morph and Cycling archetypes down the line.

You may have noticed our last-picks up above were almost exclusively Jund colors, which is an interesting thought. I would almost want to conclude the Jund might be the worst color combo in the Cube, but many of the above cards aren’t terrible by any means, so I’m not 100% sure what to make of it.

And finally we have our last-picks that got randomized abilities of potentially any color. Boy are these odd ones.

Infest with Divination stapled onto it? A counterspell with surge? A Black-Green creature with Control Magic for three-mana? Yeah, some of these are clearly quite good now, but others are just weird. I’m not convinced Break Open will ever be good, and I think Reclaim might be strong as long as you time it right and don’t Brainstorm-lock yourself out of the rest of your deck.

So that’s all for this update on Cube: Legacy. I’m considering taking a picture of the winning deck at the end of each draft, so you might see that next time. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the format, what looks fun and dumb to you, as well as any questions or comments you might have.

If you’re interested in broader topics, I recently wrote a post about Digital Deck-builders and why I think they’re worth taking a look at.

-Taylor Shuss (@Drawnonward)

P.S. – I just love the look of this card now and hope to make more weirdo cards like it, so please indulge me.