Homemade Cube Double Faced Cards

 

I dipped an experimental toe into the world of double-faced magic cards a couple of print runs ago and have been testing them in the homemade cube since. While I think it is a bit of a logistically fiddly mechanic it did transpire that a lot of people's favourite cards, myself included, are flip cards. This is because they are able to cleanly show a narrative and "do the thing"- a neat summation of what is most fun in a magic card. A flip card allows for arc in a way that most cards do not. With that being the case it felt necessary to master the art of designing double faced cards. 

With designing double faced cards you have twice the real estate to work with for more art, names, card types, and of course mechanics allowing for much more combinations of things going on, all without risk of the card getting busy too quickly. Obviously the more moving parts you add to a card the more of a challenge design and balance becomes. I learned this the hard way with planeswalkers and companions. I also generally learned that when you don't know something you get it more wrong. This is why the double faced cards I designed have been lurking in the background for so long. I made them to experiment. I knew I would get a lot wrong about them and need a long time using them to learn how to do it right, or at least better. As such I designed a spread to cover various bases and probed a bunch of avenues. I also designed relatively few, in part because you never want lots of these kinds of card slowing down games and drafts. Also because I simply didn't know what I was doing. 

I made around 25 total cards. a bunch of which ended up just being riffs on real cards I liked. It is hard to go bottom up design on these cards as there is so much going on and that made it harder still as that had been my main design process. I think in hindsight it was my biggest stumbling block. When a double faced card fails it can be because the card is bad or because the flavour doesn't work, it needs both parts to work together much more so than a normal magic card. In many ways you need it to justify the extra logistical component with the flavour. When you have no specific story you are trying to tell the inspiration for these kinds of cards is elusive. In the end I just wound up picking real world examples of things and doing a top down design tribute. This lead to some cards that worked in a flavour sense but were often not suited to cube play. 

Righto, lets look at the cards one at a time as see what is good and what is not so good and why!

Amenemhat the Returned // Interred Open

Design 8

Balance 4

One of the more fun cards. The flavour and art all work together and the bonus discard ability temps you to find ways to have a good time with it. This was all a bit of an accident, it somewhat made itself once I had the notion of a black creature that flipped into a saga and back again. The card plays pretty well and it is pretty fun but it is a touch over tuned. I toyed with adding another stage to the saga to keep him away longer but think losing a toughness and 3 life instead of 2 on stage one will be enough to get him to the right power level. Obviously with an ability that is so scalable this one will be more sensitive to the quality of discard effects in the meta. Even with both the suggested nerfs the card will be very much on the upper power level of my cube. I am pretty happy with this for several reasons. One is that this card is not super direct. Power is safer when it is spread out doing different things. Secondly much of the power is locked within synergies, and you need to pony up for double black on a three drop as well, all somewhat gating the power. Lastly however, I think you just want your flashier flagship cards to have a little more zest under the bonnet! Flip cards want to be flashy and thus command a little more liberal spreading of the power.

Giant Cocoon // Giant Moth

Design 4

Balance 6

Here is a card that attempts to "fix" Delver of Secrets, and in that vein it does an OK job. If this were red or white, or even blue, it might be a bit too good as those colours are all quite strong at leveraging cheap efficient threats with evasion. In green this is just small and slow. It is fair but because it is not super useful rather than because the power level is right. The flavour is nice but this card still misses the mark. This is because the grandeur is lacking. A flip card wants to be a bit more exciting than this, it wants to be the big event and not a supporting act opening things up. Flipping this is too much effort for the excitement it brings. Delver of Secrets is more egregious in a lot of ways but the top of deck lottery does at least add some excitement to the situation that this fails to do. Caution - when fixing bad cards one may find more problems than are immediately apparent! This is a neat enough card that might have been a failure as a card design but was a great success in being a learning experience. It isn't a problematic card, it just isn't an exciting or great one. I'll leave it in the cube while there is space but it doesn't have long term prospects.

 

Hermit // Best of Bodmin

Design 3

Balance 5

I felt I should have a werewolf card in the flip card roster but forcing myself simply resulted in a supremely dull filler card. Coupled with the fact this is gold and we have a less playable and less useful card than the Giant Moth. There is nothing wrong with this per se but it isn't a card I want gumming up the works in a cube setting. I may try and rework this into a flashier threat in the 3-5 mana range and try and emulate Huntmaster of the Fells a bit more - there is good reason that card was so popular and it wasn't the power level for very long! 

Map // Treasure Island

Design 6

Balance 7

A shameless rip on Treasure Map / Cove. The flavour on this concept is just such a clean win and I loved the original. Mine is a little more front loaded . I prefer my general flavouring despite it being hard to criticize either. I also like that mine is more generally useable given the spread of across the card. This is one of the few examples of a cheaper, more supporting role orientated flip card that manages to work. The only real qualm I have with this is the similarity - it feels unoriginal, because it is! I probably need to call it Booty Map or something too so as to distinguish it from Map tokens...  

Aladdin's Lamp // Genie of the Lamp

Design 8

Balance 7

One of my favourites as it manages to fire on all the important axis and a couple of extra bonus ones. It has the important flavour cohesion while also being flashy and potent enough to merit the double sided treatment. I like how this pays tribute to some classic magic cards thus ticking that all important nostalgia vibe (despite failing to credit Dan Frazier correctly on the first printing...). Like the Treasure Map there are plenty of existing magic cards that attempt to show the genie in the lamp trope but I feel I have managed to do a better job with mine, largely due to the implementation of the double sided card. I also really like how both sides of the card remain relevant regardless of which you commit to which is one of the better justifications for the MDFC branch of the dual faced card tree. The original design on this was nearly identical but had the card draw stuck on the genie side, you would tap your lamp, flip your card then use it once, flip it back and draw a card. I felt like this was a neater top down flavour/mechanics mesh but the problem was it was basically just a convoluted vehicle involving a flip each time it was crewed. A design that is messy and forced for the sake of flavour is big fail and so we moved to this design where both halves of the card independently have merit while also being suitably linked to each other. This is a high power card but it comes with plenty of tempo risks and is ultimately pretty slow. As mentioned, I think you need extra power in the flip cards as it helps justify them and make them exciting but it needs doing with caution. The extra moving parts mean extra flexibility and more unexpected scaling potential resulting in much more easily broken cards. Adding back in a bit of a slow yield or risk helps keep things calm. 

Teumessian Fox // Canis Minor

Design 2

Balance 4

This is a pretty impressive fail case all round. I spent way too much effort trying to keep this fair and in doing so I fell at almost every other hurdle. This is not an exciting card. You don't even really get to do the thing. It just dies and the thing happens. It is exciting enough to make you set about doing it so it just happens when your opponent gets involved. The power level of the card is pretty high but in a way that most places would find hard to take great advantage of, and your typical blue deck struggles even more. There are plenty of little mistakes here too. I failed to make these legendary border dropping some visual consistency. Even the rarity feels like a miss! One of the worst things about the card is the bolted on scry. You just don't want extra like that on your mana sources, you just want to tap it and play your thing. It should have been an "or" not an "and"! It is comfortably one of the most frequently forgotten abilities on one of my cards, and that itself is a huge indicator that it is a bad ability! This lacks the raw power and flashiness that a double sided card should pack while still managing to be a little over tuned. It doesn't even really feel blue! Perhaps I can make something out of this by going white?

Siddhartha Gautama // Enlightenment

Design 7?

Balance 6?

This remains one of the more elusive flip card designs. I simply don't yet know if it is a win or a fail. Certainly the power level is pretty high but it is also a slow and risky card. Mostly this is a Lumengrid Warden and that is a pretty hard sell for any deck. It does get play but not as much as you might expect given the seeming high power level. Aggressive decks don't have the time to wait for the returns and control decks are not too enthused about playing low impact cards that die to their own mass removal. For midrange decks there are polarity issues in that the front end is too little for too long and then the back end could well be too much. I like the feel of this card, it is cute and cool. I dont know if that affection is causing bias and blindness to it or if it just hasn't had quite enough action yet. There is a lifegain synergy coming to white in the firth print run and that could well push this entirely out of hand. Lots still to do and learn with this one. Not least fixing the lack of legendary frame on the frontside.  

Sword in the Stone // Excalibur

Design 8

Balance 5

Much as I think this is pretty cool design I can't take too much credit as I saw something very similar on a custom cards post somewhere and stole it! I don't even know who I stole it from to credit them with their good idea! The front end will be coming in tapped when I get round to balancing this one as it just makes the card a little too low cost to play. There is too much potential payoff for the low low inclusion cost. Beyond that I am pretty happy with the card although there have been calls from others in my playgroup for the backend to do more to increase the excitement of it. I had a request to make it also make a 1/1 token every turn when flipped. I don't hate that conceptually but think the flip cost needs rather increasing if so.

Stealth Elf // Murmuring Woods

Design 7

Balance 4

I made this mostly to troll one of my playgroup who takes real issue with me placing any nonland, specifically creature mana source like a Llanowar Elf, with my lands. I get it but old habits die hard and so it still happens. Turns out this troll card is one of the cooler cards. Indeed, it is also one of the more powerful and rather needs dialling back. A tap cost added to the front flip and a mana to the return flip should get it inline power wise. As printed this card was just tedious in combat being able to fog an attacker and dodge removal and generally be a real pain all on top of being pretty decent acceleration. It is basically super Sakura Tribe Elder. The design idea was that you would flip it over once early to have it be mana then back late to be some chump body for something. In reality it was cost a little too efficiently and spent all day long flipping back and forth! Despite being quite a low key support card there is something about this that carries it as far as deserving on of the few slots I want to have for dual faced cards. I think it feels safe and homely and elvish which is perhaps enough.

Daphne // The Laurel

Design 2

Balance 5

A fail similar to that of the Fox. The mana source is not quite so tedious in use as the Fox's, and the Laurel offers rather more power. That being said, you have even less agency over flipping Daphne and that is a big part of the narrative enjoyment of the transform cards. It is well known that most cards in magic where you give a choice to the opponent are sucky and I had managed to do that here without even noticing! Regardless, this is a low impact card that isn't exciting, isn't really doing anything much of much or directly, and just gums up a game in an annoying kind of way. This is an example of a card I went full top down on and in doing so missed creating a card with mechanical cohesion or relevance. I have no real notion of how to fix this, only that doing so would involve significantly different looking end result so much so that it probably couldn't be considered the same card. It is funny that a card that isn't that problematic in a power sense from any perspective could be such an impressive fail from a design perspective. 

Orpheus // Apollo's Lyre

Design 5

Balance 2

Despite the low ratings I have bestowed upon this one I think it might wind up lasting if I rebalance it properly. It is simply rather over tuned in addition to being quite tedious to play against! All sorts of unkillable on the dork end with hard to interact with tedium that really messes with your shit on the back end. Orpheus would come down and control the early game to some extent and when you were beyond just needing some sticky stats you can upgrade into the powerful board control tool that is the Lyre. This was fully top down design, I had no notion of what I wanted the card to do mechanically and the result is something that really dominates other creature strategies. I think I am effectively going to hit every aspect of this card with a nerf and that should result in somewhat interesting little tool for green to use. It reminds me a bit of Bow of Nylea, a bit of a mess of a card but surprisingly useful in a wide array of novel green builds. To fix this I will make the discard to bounce ability sorcery only, remove the stun on the tap, and add a mana to the goad/provoke mode. It might still be tedious when properly balanced but I am holding out hope that it will do more good than harm. 

Overly Curious Physician // Queen of the Dead

Design 8

Balance 7

This had been a huge success somewhat across the board. Design wise it is just a cobbled together array of mechanisms and flavours that are well worn paths. I didn't feel this card was super original nor really much my work. At best I packaged this. Regardless of how it came into being it is one of the more enjoyed, played, and explored flip cards. It also feels most like a real magic card, likely in part because I went fairly ham on the text here and used quite a lot more than normal! The card works in a lot of places being a somewhat innocuous low end support card that offers decent late game payoff. I was quite pleased to have found a reasonable way to sneak the monarch mechanic into the format without it being too present or problematic. I may well increase the dork count needed to flip from five to six if needed. Presently it seems fine but I do have a self mill synergy package coming to black in the fifth print run and this is set to get a whole lot better with that. Self mill is actually mostly just a risk in the homemade cube for most slower decks and this has absolutely caused a loss from the self mill already! With that set to change I can easily see a presently balanced card shooting to being unreasonable.

Lifeless Orb // Despair 

Design 3

Balance 2

Much as I still find this card interesting and cute, with the benefit of hindsight it is quite easy to see how it is pointless and unplayable. I am not even sure how exciting this would be in some kind of Death's Shadow synergy deck. Still probably pretty bad and there is nothing in the homemade cube to benefit from having a low life total! I have tried a few times to design stax style cards but they always come out unplayable. Being an older player the various low econ resource denial decks somewhat feel like one of the fundamental strategies in the game. It was a great choice to phase out cards like Armageddon, Balance, (Small)Pox, Wildfire, Smokestack, Braids, etc etc. They are rarely fun to play against. If you make them reasonable then they lack the required power to be playable and if not then you have just made a bad card that players will not appreciate. This pretty neatly falls into the bad card camp and I am fairly sure there is no cure where it stays cute and innocuous but somehow becomes playable. It could perhaps be made a constructed card but things like this are rarely for limited play. 

Xenagos // Temple there of

Design 6

Balance 6

I loved the idea of gods becoming a land when slain and slowly returning to power. Very Sauron. A perfect flavour and mechanic win from wizards that I wanted to steal and have a play about with myself. These cards came out as I was moving from real magic to my homemade stuff and for those cards and mechanics I became a lot less fussy about finding open design space and would essentially just do my own cover versions of cards I liked or found interesting. This is one such card. I like it, it is fun and plays reasonably well but it is a little out of balance. Nothing here is original but it does work quite neatly as a very real feeling card. The front end hits a little hard and the back end is perhaps a little slow. I am working on a way to take a small amount of power out of the card and also smooth that power return out over time a little more. As yes the game ends before it Xenegos transforms to the temple by a margin and he has not yet flipped back to life from the temple mode. Certainly not something I want to see often but more than never is desired from the final iteration. 

Firestarter Flint // Keith, Twister Firestarter

Design 7

Balance 4

The Origins flipwalkers are some of the most beloved cards in our playgroup. I would have gone pretty ham making these, likely a full cycle, had I trusted myself to get them right. I trod pretty carefully with this one, not straying too far from the beaten path! If you examine this closely it is quite akin to Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. I have even toyed with making it a 0/2 rather than a 1/1 so as to reign in the ease of flipping a bit. Mechanically I think this would be better but it just felt a lot less red. Regardless, this card is pushed. It is a bit vulnerable, a bit slow, and a bit conditional, all of which help keep the card slightly in check. And make no mistake, this is a lot of card. Flashing back cards is a lot more powerful in red than other colours as red has burn! Flipping this can also be quite a powerful swing, extremely so early, akin to the likes of Arc Trail. If you drop this on turn two, follow it with some Shock type card, flash that back flipping him then immediately using the -3 you have spread about 6 damage over upto 3 targets and only cost yourself 2 mana in the process. So far this has not been a problem as it can be seen coming and thus somewhat easily played around. If it does start to cause problems I might tinker with the loyalties, give a bit more + to the rummage and either add cost to the Shock or remove starting loyalty so that it can't happen all right away. This latter suggestion seems most wise, 2 is prently for something you can flip so quickly on the back of high tempo plays. I don't like walkers that offer minimal choice when you play them and so I initially avoided this. The cheaper flip cards are a little harder to get sufficient excitement and potential for power all packed in fairly but this little Prodigy tribute didn't disappoint. There is a trend here in the cards I copied and emulated more from Wizards did rather better than those which I branched out and explored my own ideas. 

Horn of War // Mars

Design 7

Balance 4

A bit over tuned, although comically mostly so on the front end. This is just far too good of a mana rock, you get to use it while you need it then return it to hand for value and have a relevant threat on the back of it. The Horn needs to come in tapped and perhaps even pay life to obtain red mana. Indeed, perhaps it would be a fairer card if it did something other than producing mana. The returning it should also cost more and given that this is not a picture of a horn one blows I should probably change the mechanism by which it is being returned! I like Mars himself, the card is a flavour win overall and Mars adds to this with good mechanical flavour. This is a good mana rock in any setting and the homemade cube turned out to be a format where mana ramp is really potent. 

Ferocity in the Forest // Reclaimed by Nature

Design 5

Balance 5

I tried to make a cycle of battles so as to understand them better. Fundamentally the mechanic is flawed. It is so hard to get the back end where you want it to be without breaking it in some way. The in game window for a battle being worth trying to flip is fleeting to say the least. The battle mostly ends up as all front end and becomes somewhat pointless. This green offering is my most normal of the five and it is the best and most played too, which is still not all that often. The front end is just quite good, it is in some ways a super Nissa as it ramps as well. Because the front end is so reasonable the battle should probably be 6 and not 5 to flip. Obviously with that fleeting window I spoke of the difference between 5 and 6 has yet to make itself known! If I am keeping battles I am fine with this one but battles are a bit sucky and silly. It is a lot of extra rules and phaff for negligible gain.

The Hordes of Balduvia // Spoils of War

Design 4

Balance 6

Mostly I made this as a joke. A tribute to one of my first obvious big mistakes with this whole project. I had a saga using Balduvian Horde art that made three asymmetrical token creatures with different keywords, each of which also came with a different noncreature artifact token! It was such a mess of tokens. I even made tokens for it to help solve it but it was still a logistical nightmare! Shame as the card was really enjoyable to play with and felt great. The front side of this is a little fixed, generally producing 3 tokens of the same flavour and no non creatures coming with them. Significantly reduced noise! The backside is a mess and intentionally so as it is almost never getting flipped. It is just so rarely worth the damage outlay. This card, with all its "fixing" just becomes boring. It might as well be a five mana sorcery than makes three 2/2 haste dorks and that would be a good 95% the same. This is something I have found again and again in magic - there is a card I really like that has some design flaws, however once you iron out the flaws you so often lose whatever it was about the card that was so fun and magical.

Battle at the Wall // Treasures of the Keep

Design 6

Balance 8

Simple flavour for a simple card. I like cheap card quality that can become card draw. I love a nod to the orgasmic textbox of "draw 3 cards". This sits well in most shells and plays fine. The quirky experiment on how this may be attacked proved fairly fruitless. It is some flavour but it doesn't meaningfully change the card that much, adding another defense counter or two probably just a cleaner way to go about things, if not quite as clever feeling. I tried to push out the boat and mostly just wasted mental energy and ink. Despite that this card is perfectly fine. Broadly playable and well balanced with an appropriate flavour. One pitfall is being two mana sorcery speed card quality in a format where consistency is not that big of a deal and over drawing can be! This is a card that would likely do better in other formats than it does here.

Besiege the Castle // Castle

Design 3

Balance 5

Much like the blue offering this is a small support card that is more nod and nostalgia than it is pertinent mechanics. Mostly this is Gather the Townsfolk. It is a lot of words and silliness just for a flavourful Gather the Townsfolk. Much like the blue offering, the attempted flavour of the absorb isn't interesting so much as it is tedious. Once you take the castle it is hardly exciting either. The flip side is a flavourful one but mechanically it is off, it is not what the deck that wants Gather the Townsfolk wants. It isn't so much the dull back end that is the problem here though, it is the lack of general playability. Only a white based aggro deck wants this and that makes it narrow on top of low powered and excessive.

Hold the Door // Hodor

Design 5?

Balance 1

Unlike the last two attempts at making a different battle this one really pushes the boat out. The notion of a battle that will complete itself if left unchecked eventually but at some cost is appealing. It is indeed quite interesting conceptually but an absolute chore to balance. There are just so many antagonistic moving parts in a card of this ilk. If you roll this out and ignore it you probably die to your own card. Roll this out and flip it immediately and you are doing very well thank you very much. That is not the range you are looking for ideally! I should perhaps have gone for something a little calmer like a point of life less or mill per ticking down counter. I might have another crack at a card like this but the lessons have been learned. This card was woefully underpowered and way too risky while still managing to be dangerous. While it was mostly a failure of a card it did seem to grab peoples interest.

Soratami Divination // Lake

Design 7

Balance 8

Lastly I did a cycle of MDFC lands with card advantage front sides. It seems like one of the purest forms of reducing a screw component in magic. The perfect antidote to screw and flood with the least capacity to be dead. I had been very impressed with the effect my one mana basic land cycling cards had on the format and wanted to push things a little further. The issue with card advantage on a land cycler is that both halves are bad tempo. You either have a land that cost a mana to get or an inherently tempo negative use of mana. I much preferred the chumpy low powered signpost dorks and cheap situational spells as things to have on the land cyclers, they felt right. The card advantage stuff not so much. Having lands that come in untapped at one end creates a much purer pairing. Draw cards or make mana at just ever so slightly sub par way! And these cards do play great, they get loads of play and are rarely anything other than healthy. They are however very marginal. They are low impact cards that are easily replaced, often with cards you don't even need to have picked or be in your pool! While presently I am happy with their inclusion, if I manage to make enough exciting and good cards I might really struggle to argue a case for taking up room with this cycle.  In many ways this is the perfect magic card, and in the other ways it is a bit of a waste of card. 

Ancestral Harmony // Hills

Red gets the punchier Harmonize level of card draw but it comes with the typical red time limit clause and never actually gets the cards to hand. Seems on point for flavour and power level. The only qualm here remains the cycle wide one of these cards being rather low impact.

Design 7

Balance 8

Necroboost // Bog

Design 6

Balance 6

This one is a little dodgy being as it scales at your command! The power of the card was also determined by how much pressure the opponent was putting on your life total. Suffice it to say this has been a bad swamp in a lot of games and outright unreasonably dominated some others. My gut reaction was to just up the cost to XBBB. In reality it might just be best to lock it into an X mana for X-1 cards and life loss. Anywhere in the 4-6 mana range would be fine for that. Could probably even look at 3 for 2 at instant or 3 for 3 if pushing it. Going with an X on this one was asking for a lot to line up. Especially when you look at how simple this line of cards is trying to be. Along the right lines but running before we can walk in the design process here. 

Abundance // Woods

Design 6

Balance 8

This played fine but had a built in feel bad. Obviously my unlucky friend hit three land with this on their first cast. He didn't want the Woods, 'tis why he cast Abundance. Going triple up on the thing you don't need and getting none of the thing you do need is not a recipe for a good time. I will likely drop it to 4 mana finding 2 cards but they can only be creatures. The alternative is a couple of cards at random returned from the graveyard... or perhaps by the opponent! I thought it would be fine drawing lands with this as all the other cards also can just draw lands. Turns out the fact that they are named in the mechanic makes all the difference. The land chance is artificially greater than it would be with normal draw and that brings with it resentment. 

The Inquisition // Fields

Design 6

Balance 7

This is clearly the lowest power of the cycle, and I tried to remedy that with instant speed... and failed. We were making clues, the lions share of the cost was already instant speed. That wasn't the issue, the shocking 3X +1 mana per card ratio is the issue. In the super late game where tempo is meaningless this can be pretty game breaking. Before then it is a lot less useful as card advantage. Being able to drip feed the clues over several turns helps with it being useable, but it doesn't do much for the raw power of the card or its tempo. There is also the issue with this card in that it is quite good at just making a lot of artifact tokens, The is is a one shot affinity super support card. With something like Urza or Tolarian Academy this is obviously nutty. There is nothing quite like that in the format but I am sure this card will limit design space or become problematic at some point. The fixes are all things that are sad and depressing. Like, it could go find X plains from the library, or it could cost XWW at sorcery and just make 1/1 Soldier tokens! That is after all how white sets about getting advantage much of the time. Basically X spells are just a little harder than normal cards to design, and the same is true of MDFCs, and they manage to be a multiplicative  effect!

Finding the Fun

It is now over two years on from when I stared the homemade cube project and I am just about to get my fifth print run done. Previous runs have focused on fixing issues with the format and balance on the cards. This print run is aimed differently, it is aimed at fun! Certainly I have always been aiming for this goal but to start with I didn't know what it looked like or where to find it. I assumed if I made a cube that did the things I wanted it to and balanced it well then the fun would just magically be there, and yet seemingly there is not quite enough of it yet. I have done a bunch of experimenting with card design and a bunch of probing the problems in other ways and I now think I have a reasonable grasp of what "fun" is as it relates to magic. This has been the hardest part of the whole project as it was so unexpected and so hard to assess. There is no formula for fun, no way to calculate it and add or tweak accordingly. 

Yes, we all find things differently fun and so there is no objective correct way to do it but it was clear that despite being very well balanced and achieving all my goals, that my homemade cube was simply less fun to play than my best legacy and vintage cube offerings. Different people found it differing in degrees of less fun, and I am sure they did so for their own unique reasons, but we all ultimately found it to be less fun and wanted to play it with lower frequency. I had thought I was nearing completion on the project but in reality there was much to do. It is all well and good having a functional balanced cube but if no one wants to play it then it is hard to call that a finished product. I have known it was less fun for some time but without knowing what fun was or how to produce it I had no real plan to resolve it. All I had was probing the concept and designing stuff to see if it promoted more fun.

I have now about 250 new and reworked cards done, designed and balanced pretty specifically with the various notions of what I now think should be conducive to the most fun! So what have I learned about the concept in all my probing I hear you ask? Firstly that there is fun to be had in three distinct ways in magic, or at least cube style magic, and each of those commands a different design approach to accommodate. The first of those is the draft and build element. This is where it is exciting to build towards payoff cards and then hit them. Where it is fun to push synergies and try and maximize them. And where it is really fun to find new ways to combine cards or ideas. There are creative things at play here, as well as gambling elements, all on top of your good old classic game play choices.

Then we have the gameplay side of things. Here we are looking for close interactive games but in some contrast to that we are also seeking pivotal moments, big swings, and story moments. Ideally we also want some degree of pacing going on. These are the aspects my cube failed on hardest. It did have big swings and story moments but they tended to be in epic games that lasted 45+ minutes rather than a 10 minute blast of a game. It lacked the density of good moments per unit of time played. I was also failing pretty hard on pivotal moments. It was all too incremental. You were trying to balance developing board without over extending, using and developing all your mana, lining up threats and answers, and managing your hand size. Turns out this chess style of incremental, methodical, and slow pacing is a bit of a turn off to most players. Games were good in a technical sense but there were not enough of them, and they were too much like hard work

It was easier to spot what wasn't fun than what was. It is also quite easy to solve the problem of things being a bit slow from a design perspective. It did however come with a healthy dose of irony. It meant power creeping my cube and making more polar and game ending top end and threat cards. This is something I have been complaining about wizards doing for years now and now the foot is on the other shoe.... It does mean at least that this side of the fix has had a head start on the others.

The last way in which I think people seem to have fun in magic is the individual cards themselves. This is pretty much a halfway point between the drafting and the gameplay elements and can be best summed up with the phrase "doing the thing". Cards do a thing and when you achieve that thing it is fun. The more novel and wild the thing the more fun it tends to be. The more you manage to push the thing that card does with other cards and synergies the more fun you milk from it too. This is part of why flip cards manage to be quite so fun despite being logistically a right pain in the arse in magic. They are some of the best cards at doing their thing. They have their own task or arc and a built in payoff. Sagas are also quite a fun win as they take you on a journey that gives the feeling of doing the thing. 

Synergy is the best way of "doing the thing" as all your cards get to do their thing while also all empowering the other cards in the deck to do their thing better too. Now, synergy is great. In many ways it is the foundational concept of constructed magic. In limited formats it is very hard to get right. High synergy cards can easily be parasitic on a format and reduce consistency and option density and all that good stuff we worked so hard to bake into the homemade cube! You can make your synergy cards stand alone to stop them being parasitic, but then you have the problem of the synergy decks being way too good as their cards are individually fine but combine to be greater than the sum of their parts. It seems as if this isn't a terminal problem and can be somewhat navigated around with  careful design and balance but it is certainly a longer harder process tuning the cards.

One of the big lessons I have learned regarding the adding of synergy cards is that it is best to be a little chaotic. It is all very tempting to take each colour pair and neatly assign them a synergy thing they do and then make cards for them. The problem here is that everyone just gets in their lanes and you wind up with a format of mildly varying preconstructed decks. It is a very stale draft format and quite a boring and narrow meta. The best synergies are ones that can have overlap with many of the other supported synergies, both in terms of colours and in terms of mechanics. This lets players combine way more working parts in way more clever ways. The chaos and cross pollination makes the draft and building portion of things a lot more fun and it helps to ensure the meta stays fresher for longer. On top of all this there is way more "doing the thing" happening in games and so many more happy customers. I have a life synergy rooted in white and a food synergy based in Golgari. These two mechanics do a pretty good job of blending colours and mechanics at the margins and allow for a far greater range of builds and combinations that include scalable synergies.

I have found that trying to be too rigid and balanced on the various synergy themes to be detrimental. They can vary in support, power, colours, and so forth. You do not need 8 or any specific number. More colours is better but mostly for overlap. I do tend to ground synergies in a parent colour or guild and then have more loose support and overlap in other colours. I tend to try and keep them within four colours but this is more for identity than anything else. It might get homogenous if everything was in all the colours but depending on the synergies, it might well be fine. 

I have always likened cubes, their design and their resultant metagames to ecosystems. The best and most robust ecosystems are complex ones involving lots of lines, ensuring one issue with one species can't bring the whole thing down so easily. As Richard Garfield said, Magic isn't about individual cards, it is about the interaction between them. The more ways you can find for your cards to interact with other cards in interesting and beneficial ways, the healthier of a cube format you will have created. The key to getting the synergy cubes right is to ensure the links between cards are well spread out. Links that stay mostly within clusters, even with lots of them, will result in stale formats.

To conclude, a fun format is one rich in options when picking and building, that leads to close, punchy games, with pivotal and/or story moments. This is done in a number of ways. Ensuring my threats are a bit more capable of ending games in a timely manner, and have the appropriately increasing power as we move up the curve. Then I have tried to involve as much in the way of synergy and interaction between cards, themes and mechanics as possible. Lots of "things to do" and lots of different ways and tools to help do that thing. 

It turned out it was pretty easy to make a more balanced format than any Wizards had offered. It is however proving a much taller task trying to make one that is also more fun. I fear the task will be rather longer than the first! I am looking forward to seeing how much I manage to shift the bar with this latest print run and where I manage to hit the mark best while aiming at this new target of "fun". 

Izzet Self Mill Tempo

 

Izzet tempo has always been one of my favourite cube archetypes. While it evolves all the time with the meta and new additions, ultimately it has changed least over the years compared to other ever present cube archetypes. It has a structure, a game plan, and a hierarchy of cards it is looking to play, many of which have not been eclipsed since the inception of cube. Staples such as Lightening Bolt. It is a spell based archetype and spells have changed less over the years than the dorks. There are now however some dorks with such power on offer than it is well worth warping your spells so as to support these heavy hitters. Blue can bring some very over statted and undercost dorks to bear should it go to the trouble of setting up the graveyard appropriately. Tempo decks naturally do a good job of filling up the bin with spells and very much want to be able to play under cost cards. This is a good way to get tempo but it also makes up for one of their main pitfalls at the same time (tempo decks often struggle to apply good stats and can get out muscled by other dork decks if not careful).  This all leads me to what I would call the biggest evolution of Izzet tempo in the history of cube. Not the highest of hurdles to clear but note worthy. I think it is the most powerful way to build the archetype presently in my cube but it certainly isn't the only way. There is plenty of overlap with more prowess focused versions as well as just any non combo Izzet deck. The main things you are looking for to go in the self mill direction are the good cheap graveyard filling spells and the big blue payoff creatures. Get your hands on a couple from both of those groups and you are good to go, get most of the premium ones and you are going to be fearsome. This is a list containing all the best setup and all the best payoff. It may be a little heavy on the latter but looting effects help offset that sort of thing massively.

27 spells

Thoughtscour

Mental Note

Consider

Faithless Looting

Gitaxian Probe

Lava Dart

Unholy Heat

Flame Slash

Into the Flood Maw

Brainstorm

Dragon's Rage Channeler 

Spikefield Hazard / Cave

Firebolt

Jace, Vryn's Prodigy

Slickshot Show-Off

Fire / Ice

Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel

Force of Negation

Broadside Bombardier

Abhorrent Occulus

Broadside Bombardiers

Lorien Revealed 

Pinnacle Monk

Sailor's Bane

Tolarian Terror

Murktide Regent

Ethereal Forager

13 Lands

Steam Vents

Scalding Tarn

Prismatic Vista

Spirebluff Canal

Thundering Falls

Fiery Islet

Den of the Bugbear

4x Island

2x Mountain

As your dorks hit so much harder you are not leaning on burn to finish off the game anywhere near as much as you are with other Izzet tempo builds. This allows for a much more rounded array of removal and disruption. Back in the day you just wanted the premium burn and would fight hard with other red players for that. Now you can replace a burn spell or two with more blue counter and bounce disruption and pad out the red removal with more effective removal that doesn't go face. This could mean more efficient burn like Flameslash or simply more versatile removal like Abrade. As for your blue options, you don't want loads but a smattering goes a really long way. Typically you are looking for efficiency over value in this blue effects meaning Spell Pierce is preferable to Counterspell and Unsummon is better than Repulse etc. Obviously all decks like value and drawing cards but this is not a build that leans too hard on such things. It pulls ahead by using singular very powerful cards to carry a lot of water combined with very well placed cheap cards that enable them to do so. Use what you have well rather than just getting more is the key message her. Cards like Treasure Cruise and Expressive Iteration are both incredibly powerful and pretty solid fits in the deck, the issue is that they use up precious time, mana, and setup to use and this is contrary to the way the deck is trying to win. Trying to recover with card draw is usually too late and sneaking it in sensibly otherwise usually means you are already winning. While I am happy playing draw spells in such decks I am not aiming to do so and consider them more filler than anything else. Even Ethereal Forager is a bit too value based for my liking in this deck. Sure, you can lock out the game very effectively with it and the right counter magic, or heaven forbit some form of time walks. The problem is that the card is not all that threatening by itself and so eats up a supported threat slot without often delivering on that front. 

Comically the best draw spell for the deck is Lorien Revealed as it is really more of a land that supports you in all the right ways. Partially it is like a safer Fiery Islet, helping your colour and land/spell ratio out nicely. Partly it is acting like blue cantrip that is setting you up while putting spells in the bin. The mana base is actually one of the newer things most pushing this deck that have allowed it to break out. The land cyclers are nice, the MDFC are arguably nicer, they are certainly rather more abundant now and come with a generally lower tempo cost. Plenty are playable and they allow you to play a low land count while getting a much higher ratio of instant and sorcery cards in the bin. A rare example of an archetype getting more consistent and more powerful simultaneously. Surveil lands are pretty massive too. Being able to freely sac land into a surveil is putting two cards is basically a Consider. Certainly equivalent in terms of cards put in the bin and card quality received for the same cost of effectively one mana and net zero cards. 

We want to spend the first couple of turns setting up and keeping things calm. If they start making little dorks we are likely burning those out of the way while we pile the bin full of gas. We might sneak out a little utility dork, throw out a cheeky counter, but mostly we are just setting up. Then come about turn three we want to flop out something obscene and seemingly well ahead of curve and ride that to victory! Murktide is the best in my experience but it is rather horses for courses. Ward more than makes up for being rooted to the ground against the black and white players with their efficient spot removal. A lot of the skill in this archetype is knowing how you are most likely to navigate a route to victory in any given matchup and then setting up for that accordingly. That can mean the choice between keeping a walking ward dude or an evasive flier in your first loot of the game. It can then mean identifying that the deathtouch snake token from Ophiomancer is your main problem and as such you ensure you have a plan against it. Perhaps that is forcing the issue with a Lava Dart or perhaps you are keeping mana open to answer the Ophiomancer before he charms out any snakes.

In previous builds of tempo I would want all my dorks to be somewhat threats, ideally also offering some value or utility. Here my dorks are either finishers or they are primarily for setup and utility and any threat they pose is pretty incidental. There are not too many small dorks I want to play that are primarily threats. Pteramander and Delver of Secrets are the best two as they are cheap enough to provide real tempo, sizeable enough to be a relevant threat, and importantly both fly, so as not to be negated my opposing dorks real easily. Good old DRC is the best of all the worlds being a powerful setup tool, really cheap, and pretty often a relevant evasive threat. 

Beyond the cards discussed here it is pretty straight forward. You pad out the ranks accordingly with cheap burn and cantrip card to keep things low, consistent, and easily able to fill up the bin with the right stuff. Then you jam in some looting effects to further support. Kitsa, Otterball Elite and Ledger Shredder both do reasonable work. Even simpler Looter il-Kor style cards still perform well in this sort of build. There are plenty of these kinds of cards of a cube playable power levle and most cubes will contain at least some of them. If you still need playables after milking your one and two mana cards then there are some heavier hitting three mana looters like Fable of the Mirror Breaker that are perfectly playable but will tend to slightly underperform. The enchantment side of it, or the planeswalker side of Dack Fayden can be useful if you are supporting a couple of delirium cards. Kiora the Rising Tide looks like she would be outstanding in this deck, and she is fine, but again she somewhat underperforms compared even to the two mana looter dorks, which in turn tend to be considered more as filler most of the time. Returning to the notion of delirium, the Baubles get rather more playable too under those conditions. Normally you want you cheap cyclers to be instants or sorceries but you can overlook that a little when they help in other ways and cost that sweet sweet zero. 

Recursion effects are quite nice in this list, if just a dabble. Because you are so streamlined you only have one or two bounce spells, one or two counters, perhaps only a bit of burn going face etc. You are also milling pretty aggressively and so you can easily nix all your own effects of a certain type before you need them, or just be in far greater need of certain effects than your list is equipped to handle. Having some recursion acts on multiple positive axis. Valuable redundancy and security on specific effects is one side of it but it is also a form of card selection in combination with mill. A Snapcaster Mage is a bit of a Mystical Tutor the more you have milled your way through the deck. Typically recursion is very negative on the tempo front and so my favourite froms are those that are somewhat modal or incidental.

Broadside Bombadier is the real naughty boy here, the real innovation and clinical finisher. You can just run him out and have him be fine but ideally the plan is to hold him back and use him to toss one of the massive dorks at face. Sailor's Bane is a casual 11 with the other two big ones being 9 a piece, not to mention anything either they or the Bombardier achieve in actual combat. The card is very much on my watchlist for a ban, a comfortable first pick in my cube and a card I am happy running in most decks. You don't need it in this build for it to work, it is not as key a card as Murktide or Mental Note etc but it is still the most powerful. You can go turn two Murktide into turn three bombardier and slap them down to like 2 life. Bombardier acts as both a Glorybringer style haymaker and a double Shrapnel Blast finisher, without ever being as dead or cumbersome as those cards can be. This is the cherry on the top of an already good deck that takes it from top tier to perhaps a little broken and silly. 

Powered Cube Dimir Storm

This week I got a truly foolish storm deck in a powered cube sealed deck and it lead to some wild games and plays. Given it has been a while since posting anything I thought I would take the opportunity to do a little bit of a deck tech and move into a light bit of story time. 

There are a three main ways to build a storm deck in cube setting; using artifacts, using lands, and using rituals. Artifacts is the hardest to do as you compete over some of the most contested cards in the format. Lands is the riskiest as you are either giving your opponents mana (Mana Flares) or relying heavily on a single card ( such as High Tide). No surprise then that my build is a Ritual based one. Black and red both offer rituals but it is in many ways harder to go both of those colours than just one of the Ritual providers. This is simply down to consistency and having the right colours to both go off and while in the process of going off. You typically need a load of filtering tools like Signets and Chromatic Star to be able to make a Grixis ritual storm deck. You can drop the blue but that is a tall order and means you then lean on a few cards that do blue things outside of the colour pretty hard such as Wheel of Fortune or even just a humble Night's Whisper. With all this in mind my Ritual storm decks in cube tend to be Izzet or Dimir. Red has more Rituals and more ways to replay them than black but black is a more natural pair as a combo partner with great Tutors and proactive protection cards like Duress. Not to mention better disruption in general.

Below is my Dimir Ritual storm deck that is as near the nuts as is reasonably plausible in a limited setting.

14 Lands

2 Swamp

6 Island

Polluted Delta

Bloodstained Mire

Undercity Sewers

Darkslick Shore

Gemstone Caverns

Mystic Sanctuary

Chrome Mox

Lions Eye Diamond

Lotus Petal

Black Lotus

Sensei's Divining Top

Ancestral Recall

Careful Study

Mental Note

Brainstorm

Dark Ritual

Cabal Ritual

Profane Tutor

Nightscape Familiar

Orcish Bowmasters

Collective Brutality

Snapcaster Mage

Mana Drain

Brain Freeze

Yawgmoth's Will

Time Twister

Trinket Mage

Spellseeker

Time Warp

Time Spiral

Bolas's Citadel

Echo of Eons

There are obviously a few areas ripe for some improvement. The mana base would have loved a searchable UB land I could bring in untapped and could have been enhanced somewhat significantly beyond that too. It did however perform more than adequately and was never an issue thanks to the raw power of everything else! 

There is also obviously room to throw more power at any list and improve it, notably here with things like Mox, Sol Ring and Time Walk. Given quite how much power was already in the list we are well above average already and deserve no such improvements. 

I thought I was weak in win conditions, or at least a bit thin. I wanted Sheoldred or Tendrils of Agony over the Bowmasters but having played I am not sure that is right. A two mana instant speed card with the ability to disrupt is a whole load more manoeuvrable! I was just being greedy and unnecessarily so. I wanted life gain and the ability to win with a single Twister effect or relatively low storm count. There was more than enough power and consistency in the deck to be able to aim higher and go thin and lean on the win conditions as was done. Happenstance forced me into making a better list. I might have been correct in my instincts for a lower powered storm deck as I am more used to piloting. 

The only actual area of the deck that could reasonably be improved was the various Tutor cards. Any of Entomb, Demonic and Vamp would have been superior to Trinket Mage, Spellseeker and Profane. All told I probably had enough raw draw, redundancy, and card quality to not be too bothered. I should probably have cut one of the weaker Tutors and packed another interactive card or cheaper filler card. Tutors are just quite clunky relative to the rest of the list. A nice cover all bounce spell would have been the first in line for a slot. The Mana Drain was my worst card being hard to hold up, unreliable and fairly off theme. I had a Brazen Borrower in the pool that should have been in its place, or that of one of the tutors. Really Force of Will or Spell Peirce is the most suitable countermagic for this kind of list. Beyond that we are typically a bit better off with black hand disruption.

Story 1!

It is hard to call a Force of Will "the best ever" because it is comfortably one of the cards most conceded to and it is harder to do better than winning the game! I can however be fairly confident I was the recipient of the best ever Force of Will that was not an immediate concession. I was on the play and had both LED and Lotus complete with Bolas's Citadel in hand (I am not sure if you can currently play a spell from hand with LED but that is the rules set we were playing with). It was infact game one match one and so I had no idea what I was up against and figured that a Citadel was going to be real hard to beat! I didn't even play a land from hand before discarding to the LED because I waned to play more off the top. Suffice it to say I walked into a Force of Will and had to pass on turn one with 0 cards in hand and 0 cards in play. It is testament to the quality of the deck that I didn't conceded. I did ultimately lose and fail to have the greatest comeback story of all time but it was at least a game there after. They made a turn four Pest Infestation for six dorks and killed me with them two turns before I would have won. Turns out recovering when your deck is full of draw sevens and fast mana is easier than for most decks!

Story 2

In this anecdote we join the game around turn three or four and I have just tried to resolve a Bolas's Citadel. Although no counterspell, my opponent responds with a Hullbreacher - a pretty serious problem for my deck with minimal removal and a combo based around drawing cards. Never the less I start to play a couple of spells off the top. I am trying to at least find a land so I can make that for the turn and bes tset myself up to try to play through the Hullbreacher problem. Suffice it to say I am not wildly confident at this point. Before I hit my land I hit Ancestral Recall. I am suddenly faced with a poetically intriguing set of choices. I can do nothing, pass the turn and leave the Ancestral on top and harmlessly draw it next turn. I don't love this just doing nothing and pass option, it is the antithesis of what my deck is trying to do! The next option is to cast it and clear it from my deck and giving away three Treasure. My opponent had tapped out to deploy the Hullbreacher and giving him access to three more mana didn't feel at all sensible. Comparably dangerous to just passing the turn given the stage of the game we are at. There is of course a third option. Ancestral is targetted draw and so I could aim it at the opponent and let them draw three rather than giving away treasure and getting access to more mana as the other options did. I was essentially faced with a three way choice in which I had to give my opponent the effect of a Time Walk, a Black Lotus, or an Ancestral Recall! I went with the latter, managed to dodge their Force of Will and went on to win that same turn! Teehee. 

Homemade Cube on CubeCobra

 

I have put the Homemade Cube on CubeCobra. Here is the link to it. It only works as a visual spoiler.

https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/03b82ec4-3b83-4fdb-8de3-f11faf16800f?view=spoiler

This is something I am happy to finally call a finished article. Hopefully I will never be properly finished as I continue to tinker away but this is a good a place as any to call it a done deal. This is about half the cards I have made that play the best and work the best with one another. I have not included new cards I am still testing either although I do plan to update this as I change it. Turns out a CubeCobra list for my cube is just a very useful tool to have for myself if nothing else. I am very used to using these kinds of program to look at cubes and find them an excellent way to review etc. 

The link is only visual as I used the function that allows uploads of custom images for the sake of alters. I however used images for wholly different cards. Sorry to the CubeCobra people for the messing up of any data. Hopefully they can offer a fake card template or tag function for people wanting to use it for fully custom cubes so that we are not throwing a spanner in the works. To an uninformed onlooker not seeing the visual spoiler this cube is going to look pretty wild!

Red White Cards, Fine Tuning Cubes, and Ajani the Leader

 

In almost every cube I have played or curated there are two types of cards, which I think can be broadly summed up by calling them leaders and followers. The leaders are the bombs, they dictate your direction, colours, and ultimately archetype. They are the gravity wells which you navigate your draft and deckbuilding around. Then there are the followers, typically support and filler cards. These cards will fill out your curves and get you to the right number of threats and removal, and you will pick the ones that best work with your leaders/bombs. 

Adding and removing cards from a cube that fall into the follower group of cards does little to change things, at least on a card by card basis. The effect is small and the meta stays much the same. Especially if you are simply upgrading a like for like card. When a new leader card enters the fray there is a whole mix up in the format. New archetypes can arise, the relative strengths of the existing ones can change and it can cause a load of old follower cards to no longer cut it. The flip side of this latter point is also the case, there are often follower support and filler cards that might have not quite cut it before that, when a new leader comes along they are the perfect cards to answer the call. 

As a cube curator, getting the little details right on your follower portion of cards is arguably more important than the leaders. It is the crossing of the ts and dotting of the is. It is certainly harder for a number of reasons. For one, it is more subtle. Secondly it is a lot less well known, The bombs are quickly outed in constructed and limited play, everyone knows what the hot new cards are and they will do fine when thrown into any old cube. There are however a lot lot more follower cards vying for the remaining cube slots, and they are of a much more homogenous and indistinguishable power level. They are also often hidden in the back catalogues of cards resurfacing to usefulness rather than a new release under the spotlight. 

The well designed cubes reveal themselves through well chosen follower cards that really let the leader bomb cards shine. Cards that work with multiple leaders so as to cohesively tie the cube together and make for a smooth experience. Trying to talk generally about magic is always tricky and so I think it is easiest to look at one example and discuss the ripple changes that it can affect.

This Ajani dude is very much a leader. His floor is pretty outstanding and he has ceiling to go with that for days. You don't need to do anything for this card to be over powered. His presence in my cube has helped push white aggro decks back to the top of the pile and give a boost to white in general, not to mention wildly increasing the instance of Boros aggro and Orzhov sacrifice decks. This is a perfect example of a leader card in that it has had a pronounced effect on the frequency, performance, and composition of established archetypes. Recognizing it as such I have found myself tailoring a selection of follower cards.

Ajani having so many strings to his bow has a number of ways you can support him. Being a cheap aggressive white dork he naturally fits into aggressive white decks, which were already a fully supported tier one archetype. Indeed, he is a good stand alone aggressive two drop than scales a lot better with anthems than most, so off to a pretty strong start. You wouldn't think we needed the followers. That sort of isn't the point, it is not about need, it is about interest and interlinking and discovery. It is worth doing because when you do the things people enjoy it more, and have better stories to tell. 

So, what previously unsupported things can we do to support Ajani? We can add cats. More cats out there means more instances of dying cats and therefor more chance to flip thing dude into even more power and value. Just being a cat is otherwise pretty unimportant, this bonus synergy with one other card is not making a significant difference, really it is more of a tie breaker, and so the reality of it is likely being as a minor as replacing your Spirited Companion with a Helpful Hunter. 

Alternatively we can focus more on seeing off the cat we get with Ajani by focusing on some productive ways to sacrifice dorks. Black and red are pretty well covered on this front in most cubes but there are some options open to white that are typically less explored. While these are not often as good as the Rakdos options they can offer more construction and draft options thanks to being more playable. As an example, I have found Spawning Pit to be surprisingly good in most creature heavy shells.

We can also just go a bit more contained and have a cat that has a built in means to usefully self sacrifice! 

My favourite new pursuit however has been finding stealth red cards I can play in my white deck as a means to support Ajani. For full ceiling mode you want to flip your Ajani while in possession of a red thing, then shit gets pretty wild! Every time I read it I am surprised by how powerful and unfair it all is. You can shoot people right in their dumb unexpecting faces! Obviously this makes Ajani perform best in Boros, but you can't or don't always want to be Boros, and it is nice to have that potential ceiling available even if you don't want to reply on red mana. The aggro decks want that consistency most so unless you are forced into it or have great fixing I typically like to keep it lean, clean, and mono where possible. 

So, what cards cat I put in my white deck that give red things without costing red mana? And which of those can cut it in the high powered world of cube? First up we have the hybrid mana cards. Your Figure of Destiny and Boros Reckoner style cards. While Reckoner is a bit too tired looking these days even to get a recall for supporting synergy the Figure still holds up rather well. Instant speed level up has ensured it has outlasted all the actual level up creatures! I rather like Duergar Hedge-Mage too but that is a card you do actually want Mountains in your list for even if you don't need them.

Some of the manland duals are reasonable ways to sneak a red card into your deck. Yes, these are pointless if you don't have red mana to support them but they are not dead cards like a proper red card should you not find the mana, they are still EtB tapped Plains at worst. A low cost include, and given an extra boost by the being red synergy! You can often sneak a little bit of bonus utility into a mana base supporting just manlands as well, be that a Sunbaked Canyon or Elegant Parlour. Both Restless Bivouac and Needle Spire have some good synergy in white aggressive decks and while I don't always play them when the the option is there, I often do. I find if I want a bit more lands for consistency I become worried about flooding and when that is the case cards like these, and the things that in turn support them like the Sunbaked Canyon, all start to appeal way more. 

Next on our little list we have the sneaky flip cards that become red despite white appearances. There is both Brutal Cathar // Moonrage Brute and Town Gossipmonger // Incited Rabble. The Cathar has been impressing since its inclusion and has not yet had a cull. This little boost should help keep it in for longer. The Gossip has been in and out plenty of times over the years and is a surprisingly impressive little card. Firebreathing is not common in white and so this dude does a better job of scaling than most other cheap dorks, and it does so without being a complete dud as an early beater. That being said, it is now quite old and is no match for the kinds of one drop we see in Modern Horizons...

Last on my list of sneaky red white cards we have Glimmer Lens, or really any "For Mirrodin!" card for that matter. Lens is just white and good. It is one of those cards that really ties a room together. It just has synergy with almost everything going on in a white aggro deck. The power level of the card is just fine, but with all those nice little synergy perks the card is one I don't recall having ever left out of a white aggro deck.

And with that, happy fine tuning your cubes. And have fun trying to shoot people to death with surprise red things in your white deck.