Building a Budget Powered Cube

Cube is one of the best ways to play Magic: The Gathering. Every player, no matter their skill level, can see the appeal of choosing cards in a draft. The quick decision-making process of trying to build the best deck at the table can be fun and rewarding.

The Powered Cube takes a normal draft and pushes it to the absolute max by playing cards straight out of the Power Nine, Black Lotus included. Constructing this monstrosity in paper would set you back potentially more than a year's wage, unless you plan on proxying it.

So, what if we built this powerful Cube on a strict budget?

I bring you: the Poor Man's Powered Cube.

Crafting Powered Cube on a Budget

The cards that are the most powerful in Magic: The Gathering usually carry a high price tag. Reprints bring these cards down in price occasionally and can also be influenced by power creep. My goal for this project is to create a Powered Cube experience without spending more than $5 on a single card.

The Powered Cube experience demands fast, explosive starts, lots of free interaction, and bombs that warp the game. There are many archetypes present in the environment of Powered Cube. Reanimator, Control, and Green Ramp are some of the most prevalent archetypes inside of Powered Cube.

Let's dive into some of the most popular draft archetypes and some of the defining cards in each.

Powered Cube Draft Archetypes Explained

Powered Cube isn't just one set list, there are many different variants using lots of different cards. However, there are a lot of crossovers in the theming of many of these Cubes. I am going to be mentioning these different themes a lot in this article so let's define each one. The most prevalent archetypes of Powered Cube include:

• Reanimator: Reanimating huge creatures ahead of schedule that have devastating effects on the course of the game.
• Aggro: Boros () Aggro is a classic strategy where the goal is to burn your opponent's life total to zero as quickly as possible.
• Control: Azorious Control is another classic draft archetype where you try to stop your opponent dead in their tracks before they can get their gameplan off the ground.
• Green Ramp: Green is always known as the color to house the most giant creatures and mana ramp. Powered Cube tends to lean into this heavily and curve out to a massive creature threat in the early game.
• Artifacts: Artifacts is another popular archetype for Powered Cube. Most of the cards that make up this section of a Cube tend to be expensive, however, I made sure there is still support to run this strategy.
• Everything Else: There is nothing wrong with having no clue what you are drafting in the moment. Since this Cube is composed of the most powerful cards to ever be printed in Magic, simply drafting a pile of cards that share colors can be effective enough. You can never go wrong with just Junding a player out (playing the color combination )

This list encompasses every single archetype present in the list I have built for this project. Now I will go into each one and highlight some of the key cards in each. Again, all these cards are under $5, some of these you might even have laying around in bulk boxes in your own collection. You could repurpose that bulk for a greater purpose... in a Cube.

Reanimator

Reanimator is my personal favorite thing to build no matter what format or event I am playing in. Cheating out massive threats early and having explosive plays are exhilarating. Every good Reanimator deck has a couple of key cards and usually multiple copies of each. These key cards are:

• First, you need cards to fill your graveyard. This can be with cards like Faithless Looting or Buried Alive. Whatever way you find to get your creature to the graveyard as quickly as possible, play it.
• Then, you need cards that are Reanimator targets. Huge flying threats or creatures with powerful enters the battlefield triggers are the best to go for. Archon of Cruelty can be especially punishing in the early game.
• Last, you'll need cards that Reanimate creatures from your graveyard. This is the bread and butter of this archetype. Unburial Rites and Victimize are some classic spells that bring your creatures straight into play from beyond the grave.

As long as your deck has a few copies of each of these cards you will be off to the races. Getting cards in your graveyard should be the easiest of these.

Unmarked Grave, Bitter Triumph, Lively Dirge, Party Thrasher, Fauna Shaman, and Grist, the Hunger Tide are early game spells that help put creatures from your hand or deck into the graveyard.

Don't forget as you are drafting to look out for large creatures to put into your graveyard. Woodfall Primus, Cityscape Leveler, Titan of Industry, Tivit, Seller of Secrets, Archon of Cruelty, and Massacre Wurm are a few examples of creatures in this budget Powered Cube that are great targets for Reanimation.

Most of these creatures have a powerful Enter the Battlefield trigger or attack trigger that will win the game if not dealt with quickly.

Once some creatures are sitting comfortably six feet in the ground, it is time to dig them back up. Exhume, Persist, Stitch Together, Dread Return, Metamorphosis Fanatic, and The Scarab God are what you want to see being passed to you in a draft. All of them are efficient ways to bring creatures straight into play from the graveyard that hopefully will catapult you to victory.

Aggro

Red Deck Wins. This statement has been echoed across ages throughout Magic: The Gathering's entire history. Powered Cube features many popular spells that aid in the strategy of burning your opponent's life total as quickly as possible.

The goal of this archetype is to cast threats quickly and pile them on until your opponent can't answer them all. This strategy is not as complicated as Reanimator but still has some key cards to look out for.

You will need early game threats, so Creatures that come down one turns one and two that pack a punch are vital. You will also want to make sure you have efficient removal - Lightning Bolt doubles as a piece of removal or a card that can be used to deal straight damage to your opponent. That's really all you need to make aggro work.

Guide of Souls, Adorned Pouncer, Kellan, Planar Trailblazer, Robber of the Rich, and Slickshot Show-Off are all perfect for making your opponent start to sweat.

Make sure to give them a clear path by removing your opponent's blockers with Burst Lighting, Path to Exile, Abrade, Soul Partition, and Get Lost. Aggro is a simple archetype when you break it down, but still serves a challenge when trying to win with it.

Control

Control is a polarizing archetype for both the pilot and the person sitting across the table. Control attempts to, well, take control of the game by only allowing the spells they want to resolve.

This group of cards is full of evasive threats to chip in for damage and a mix of removal and counterspells to stop your opponent from playing the game. Don't forget to look for these if you want to build into a control strategy.

1. Hard-to-Block Creatures: Countering your opponents hopes and dreams still doesn't win you the game. You need to be able to deal combat damage, and evasive creatures make that part easy.
2. Counterspells: Stopping an opponent's spell can be incredibly backbreaking at the right moment and leave your opponent with no clear path to victory.
3. Removal: Making sure you don't die to your opponent's creatures that dodged a counterspell is key. Pack your deck full of lots of removal or boardwipes.

Control is all about sitting and waiting. Knowing when the right time is to counter a spell can be challenging but also rewarding when you see the life leave your opponent's face. Spider-Woman, Stunning Savior, Aang, Swift Savior, Cecil, Dark Knight, and Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel are all creatures that can get in for damage while also having an upside.

Counterspell, Daze, Memory Lapse, Remand, Deny Entry, and Launch Mishap are all perfect cards for this budget Powered Cube. These counterspells are highly efficient at what they do, and some even offer an upside. If you are passed some of these in a draft, you may decide that Blue could be open as a color.

Into the Floodmaw, Unwanted Remake, Balance, Split Up, Wrath of God, and The Wandering Emperor are all great pieces of interaction for multiple scenarios. Whether you need to remove one creature, or multiple, or an entirely different card type altogether, control has an answer to everything.

Be wary of those two untapped Islands going into your turn.

Green Ramp

Green Ramp is the only archetype to have a clear color identity in Powered Cube. Almost every other archetype can splash into multiple colors for specific cards. Mono Green Ramp is as cut and dried as its name ensues. The goal of this archetype is to drop ramp spells turn one and two and then drop massive threats in the later turns of the game.

Ramp spells are easy to spot. First, they will most likely be Green, unless you happen to find a Sol Ring in your pack.

Every ramp spell will put you ahead on mana production and most of the time will be played on turn one. Elvish Mystic, Fyndhorn Elves, Utopia Sprawl, Channel, Sylvan Caryatid, and Tender Wildguide are some amazing ramp options that could come up in a draft of this budget Powered Cube.

Huge threats are plentiful in this list. Questing Beast, Ulvenwald Oddity, Mightform Harmonizer, Gigantosaurous, and Elder Gargaroth are some draft bombs that you can play hopefully by turn three.

Quilled Greatwurm, Regal Force, Tyrannex Rex, and Cultivator Colossus are some of the heavy hitters at the top end of the curve that will do a number to your opponent's life total.

Artifacts

Artifact decks take advantage of casting artifact spells. Whenever you cast an artifact spell, one of your permanents will trigger, causing a series of events to happen.

These decks are usually focused on snowballing out of control over multiple turns and overwhelming your opponent in advantage. Artifact decks usually contain lots of artifacts and cards that benefit from you casting them.

God-Pharoah's Gift, The Endstone, and Wondrous Crucible are the highest mana value artifacts in this Cube. These are extremely impactful artifacts that will snowball you into a win over a few turns. You can cheat these massive permanents into play with a Trash for Treasure or a Tinker. Both of those powerful cards require you to have an artifact in play, which should be easy to do with some of these other cards.

Oltec Matterweaver, Forensic Gadgeteer, Obsessive Pursuit, Storm-Kiln Artist, Sentinel of the Nameless City, and Pinnacle Emissary all pump out artifact tokens in the blink of an eye.

Artifacts don't have to be locked into a particular color or color combination, and you can clearly see that based on these cards above. If you have a steady supply of Artifacts hitting the table, you should have no problem finding a way to win from there.

Everything Else

There are numerous strategies present in Powered Cube. Since every card included in the Cube is the best of the best, simply playing a random pile of cards is sure to score you a win here and there.

In this section I will simply highlight some cards that you can decide to build around that aren't within the realm of the archetypes in which I went into detail above.

Orzhov () has a lot of drain effects present in this Cube. Mai, Scornful Striker, Sorin of House Markov, Marionette Apprentice, and Leonardo, Cutting Edge all have a life gain and life drain synergy going on.

Putting a few of these cards together with some of the Orzhov pieces strewn across the Cube could be strong.

Rakdos can also be an aggro color combination. Lightning Skelemental is one of the coolest cards to come out of the original Modern Horizons set for this color combination. Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger and Ob Nixilis, the Adversary are early game threats that attack life totals relentlessly.

There are a few three colored cards in the Cube to help tie together some of the synergies across the colors. Thalia and the Gitrog Monster can be a powerful source of card draw in a grindy midrange deck.

Kefka, Court Mage finds a home in a control shell. Tivit, Seller of Secrets fits a similar role in control but can be combined with a splash of reanimator.

Sokka, Tenacious Tactician can combine the aggressive removal spells and artifacts for a token army. I love the way these cards can help a player really dive deep into the drafting process and try and find a home for them.

Combos

Combos are present in most Cubes. Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker is a common combo machine that goes infinite with a lot of other cards. Most Cube builders like to include it as a call back to the days when it used to live in standard.

This Cube cannot play it, simply for the fact that it is above the value of $5. That doesn't mean we can't run any combos at all; it just forces us to think a little outside of the box.

Dualcaster Mage and Heat Shimmer is a classic two-card combo that sees play in mostly cEDH these days. This combo can create an army of hasty 2/2 Mages and swing in for lethal damage. I included this combo because both cards work extremely well on their own, but if a player happens to find them together in a deck, they could enact a game winning combo with them.

Flash and Protean Hulk used to be a staple combo when I first started playing Commander. Flash allows you to put a massive threat from your hand into play and then immediately sacrifice it.

That seems like a really bad effect, until you pair it up with a creature with a game winning death trigger like Protean Hulk. In Commander, you could use this to find various combo pieces and win, but that doesn't often work in Cube.

It is in here for a few other Creatures though, notably Worldspine Wurm. This creature creates three 5/5 wurm tokens when it dies. That kind of power at instant speed can be enough to take down some of your opponent's attacking creatures and swing in for close to lethal damage.

Hullbreaker Horror and Sol Ring can create a loop of casting a noncreature spell repeatedly. This with the help of a card like Third Path Iconoclast or any Creature with Prowess, will accrue you so much value. This combo is perfect or an Artifact deck that already wants to be playing all of these powerful cards to begin with.

That pretty much wraps it up for all of the combos that I intentionally included. Combos sometimes can go under the radar when constructing a project this massive. Finding hidden combos in a random pile of cards can be a fun pass time, but we have more to cover.

Un-Cards

Cube allows you to play with a variety of cards. Channel, Flash, and Tinker are all cards I have mentioned being in this Cube that are banned in Magic's most popular format: Commander.

So, what about playing cards that are banned in all formats, such as "Un-Cards?" Silver bordered, acorn stamped, and play-test cards are just some of the wacky card designs through the years. From turning your fingers into 2/2 creatures or using the top of your head to balance cards, these designs are straight off the wall.

In a vacuum of a draft, these can be very fun and entertaining ways to mix up the game to hilarious board states. There are a number of them though that just feel like regular Magic cards, especially the play-test cards.

Play-test cards were designs that didn't quite make it off the game design workbench but still have potential. I think including some of them in this Cube can help boost the overall power but hold true to the budget restriction.

Mox Poison is essentially a piece of the Power Nine that we can include in the Cube. It's a zero-mana Artifact that generates mana the turn it comes into play, like any other Mox card.

This one, of course, has the drawback of slowly stacking you with poison counters each time you use it. If you can win with the sudden burst of mana, that's fine; however, there are some cards that could allow your opponent to proliferate those counters, so be careful.

There are a few other cards I have included from this series of play-test cards. Knight of Lost Causes, Subgoyf, Call from the Grave, Gobland, and Wrenn and One give each of the five core colors in Magic the ability to play one.

These cards match the power level of the Cube while accessing the novelty of drafting with off-the-wall designs. Who's that Praetor? is also in here and clearly a nod to the ever-popular Pokemon franchise.

Final Thoughts on the 540

This project was an absolute blast to put together. Cube drafting is one of the best ways to enjoy Magic: The Gathering with a group of friends.

I believe this Cube will offer both a powerful, explosive experience, while also having moments of laughter while trying to resolve Who's that Praetor?

The Budget Powered Cube is a Cube for everyone at any skill level. New players will have fun trying to assemble massive engines, and veteran players will steal every piece of removal and free interaction they can. If you are not sure where to start when building your own Cube, I hope you can use this skeleton as a guide.

See you on the battlefield!

-Nigel