Spotlight Cube Series – Artifact Cube

Welcome to Artifact Cube! This will be the Magic Online‘s spotlight cube running for a week starting on December 15 and focuses on that ancient card type. Often colorless, sometimes not, once mono, poly, or continuous, and often the most powerful card type in the game: the humble artifact.

Artifacts-matter cards as Richard Garfield intended.

This cube differs to the regular cubes we generally have on Magic Online in a few ways:

• 570 Cards as opposed to 540
• Four copies of certain cards
• No green cards

I hope that I still have your attention, so let me explain:

Cubes generally exist on a spectrum, with “good stuff” on one end and “synergy” on the other. Good stuff, meaning cards with high floors that are generally “good” in most cases (or strong in regards to quadrant theory to some), and synergistic, meaning the cards generally have lower floors but create holistically higher ceilings when combined with other cards in the cube.

Artifact Cube is quite close to the “synergy” end of the spectrum. While we’re not a full-on Rube Goldberg combo cube, there are slightly fewer creatures here, and more weird concoctions being made with artifacts, than you’ll see in other cubes.

Artifact Cube asks the simple question: what will you create?

As you might expect, most cards in Artifact Cube care about, or simply are, the titular card type. Not every single one (I’m looking at you black), but most. And we wanted to help reinforce this by including as many artifact lands as we could. But there are less than 20 artifact lands in existence, and most are quite destructible. We didn’t want the gameplay to revolve around destroying these particular artifacts and prevent players from actually playing the game, so we bumped up the fixing in this way: each of the six color pairs in the cube have four copies of the indestructible Bridge tap land cycle from Modern Horizons 2.

These ain’t the only fixers, but they are the only cards that break the generally accepted 1x cube rule.

Only including six cards of a ten-card cycle must mean a color was cut. And that color was green. To nobody’s surprise, green has the least synergy with the artifacts (outside of ways to remove them), so we simply removed that color from the cube. Playing only a subset of colors in a Magic Online cube is nothing outside the ordinary, as we’ve hosted Autumn Burchett’s Bant Cube, Ryan Overturf’s Grixis Cube, and Eli Rice’s Temur Cube. So, if you’re a fan of mono-green, you might want to look elsewhere, namely almost every other cube in existence. But if you wanna see how deep the Yore-Tiller rabbit hole goes, continue on.

While you can still add forests to your deck, this is all you would need them for.

So now that you know the deal, how does this dang thing actually work? Most of our Limited formats (and cubes) are built around two-color pairs. Often non-removal multicolor cards will give you a hint as to what you will be doing:

Some possible routes for you to take on your artifact Journey

And while that’s sometimes true in this environment, the one thing every color cares about is . . . artifacts! That leads to a much less “on rails” environment. Each draft of 45 cards will have an extremely high amount of playables, in part because over half the cube is colorless, but also because there are only four colors present to begin with.

While these are all colorless artifacts, they are all posing wildly different questions.

Some things this cube doesn’t have:

• Cards that immediately and completely warp the game for the player who draws it: Mishra’s Workshop, Metalworker, Tolarian Academy, etc.
• An “Eldrazi” cube. While our Eldrazi friends are indeed colorless, finding out when they don’t work with some of the cards in Artifact Cube can be a huge feel-bad.
• Efficient shatters. Red and white have a moderate number of shatters spaced out from three to five total mana value. Black has a lot of ways to remove artifacts if they’re creatures or in the hand, and blue is so in tune with artifacts, it doesn’t need any removal or theft outside of counterspells.
• Equal artifact balance among all the colors. Black just isn’t quite there (yet) and has a few more interactive “good stuff” cards like removal and disruption than the other colors.

It’s a school of thought that when all your special pieces are similar, none are special at all. The hope is that this cube balances aggro, combo, ramp, and control and rewards players for taking cards that seem weak but turn out to be exactly what their deck needs. Additionally, the existence of 30 extra cards gives a little more variety to the card pool you might see each draft.

And, finally, just some more sweet cards to show you as a send-off.

Like all the events we offer on Magic Online, I do hope you enjoy this one. It’s a little out there, and due to some issues that cropped up with the Super Jump event, we had to debut this one a little earlier than planned. Don’t you worry, though, our special Magic Online-themed Jumpstart experience will release during the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty season next year. Also, we have Vintage Cube immediately following this cube for the holiday season! You can always check out the Magic Online schedule on our event calendar here.

As always, I read everyone’s feedback, and there are more cubes coming, including more from you, the community. So, whether you played your fair share of MUD back in the day or just really enjoy your Breya, Etherium Shaper Commander deck: buckle up, hold tight, and watch out for shatters as you try out Artifact Cube!

Product Manager David McDarby (@J_Beleren on Twitter) and the Magic Online Team