Inspired by the comments preceding and around the current power level rankings, an ongoing desire to revive and update the "A Comprehensive List of Cube Archetypes" thread, and a few other posts I've seen here and on Reddit, I decided to share my thoughts on card selection and curation for cubes on a different axis. Much of this will already be known to cube enthusiasts, and I have no illusions about the fact I'm not saying anything new, but I want to consolidate a few concepts and resources into one location and provide a different type of resource for people new to cube or after a different type of custom draft experience. I'm aware MTGsal is not the target audience for this, and it might be recieved better elsewhere like Reddit or Riptide, but I kinda want to throw this idea into a real crucible and see if it survives.
I know my experiences won't cleanly translate to everyone, so I figured I'd focus on the facet that I care most about and feel will have the most relevance, something I have dubbed Buffalo Cards.
There are all sorts of animal 'totems' cards get sorted under. "Rattlesnake" cards are ones that warn other players away from targeting you, I've heard cheap, recursive threats referred to as "Cockroaches" and it is a fact universally acknowledged that "Bears" are 2/2s for 2. What then, is a "Buffalo"?
In the same way we are told that native Americans used 'every part of the buffalo', so too can we use 'every part of the card'. The ideal Buffalo card is one where every part of its text leads is relevant or meaningful, or leads to neat interactions, decisions or discoveries. Ideally, this is also a diverse set of interactions that are relevant at different stages of the game so as to increase how attractive it is to each player during the draft. Is every Buffalo card good in every deck? Hell, is every Buffalo card "powerful"? No, but that's not the goal. The goal is to reduce the linearity of drafts and encourage players to fight over cards so the draft portion of your night is as interesting and interactive as the games. Ideally this will also be making the games themselves more interesting and interactive as well, by increasing the number of decisions made, the options available for those decisions, and allowing for new discoveries or "Aha!" moments. In order for this to happen the cards do have to be good enough to consider playing for power level reasons alone, but as cube power levels vary wildly I'm not going to consider that axis when listing examples later on.
There is a ten* (Eleven? Thirteen? Eighteen?) card cycle in Magic that are the archetypal ideal of the Buffalo card. Almost every word in their text box has the opportunity to be relevant in a game of Magic, and each of those words matters differently to different decks at different stages of the game. They're also at a power level that leads players to actively fight over them during the draft regardless of archetype. In fact they're so good they may be in your cube already. Yes, you guessed it: Fetchlands.
Let's have a look at the text box of a generic fetchland and see just how much room there is for interaction.
[CARDNAME]
Land.
(T), Sacrifice [CARDNAME]: Search your library
for a (land that meets condition), put it onto
the battlefield, then shuffle your library.
Ignoring the super obvious ("They fix your mana!"), there are a lot of potent effects taking place at a very competitive cost here, all at instant speed. You likely know all of this already, but for those who want or need it I'll deploy the ugly nested spoiler.
"Pay 1 life"
Okay, we start on the weakest. Maybe you care about this, maybe you cube with Death's Shadow or Font of Agonies or... uuuuh... Gonti's Machinations? Maybe you find being Stasis-locked fun too, I don't want to kinkshame. You do you.
Sacrifice {CARDNAME}
Here we go! We're putting something in the 'yard for free! A land at that! This triggers Revolt, fuels Delve, turns on Threshold, adds a type for'Goyf and Delirium, gives you a target for Deathrite Shaman, Grim Lavamancer and Life from the Loam, pumps Knight of the Reliquary and Centaur Vinecrasher, lets you ramp with Crucible, Ramunap Excavator and Sun Titan, does nasty things with Titania. Gorgeous.
Search your library
Uuuh... Panglacial Wurm is a card? Maybe you want to "Gotcha!" opponents who fetch with Archive Trap? Maybe a Winter Orb on the other side of the table fills you with delight too, you beautiful disaster of a Magic player.
for a (land that meets condition)
The meat of the card, you know why this is good. Whatever you want to do you need mana to do it, and this gets the right colour, right away. And hey, if you're running that Gonti's Machinations you can get a shockland and get a *~second trigger~*... if you wait a turn to crack it. what value.
put it onto the battlefield,
Bloodghast! Courser of Kruphix! Evolution Sage! Okay, I'm just listing Landfall creatures here. Yes it doesn't say tapped. Yes we all know that's very good. That's a power level thing much more than a Buffalo thing, so I'm going to stop passive-aggressively talking about it now.
then shuffle your library.
Brainstorm! Top! JtMS! (On either side of the table, at that!). Don't draw that irrelevant crap you left on top, shuffle it away!
In this list we've seen cheap threats, turbo ramp cards, midrange and control creatures, value engines and card draw, running the gamut of archetypes and hitting every colour. Every drafter at your table is at least considering picking a fetch, and none of them will be unhappy to have it in their pool when it comes time for deckbuilding, even if it only hits one of their colours. This is why we want Buffaloes.
From a power standpoint, you get all of this at the very very competitive cost of
A draft pick
Including a land in your deck, and
Playing that land.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but these are all things that players have to do anyway. This obviously adds to the appeal, as for cards to be considered on the basis of versatility they need to reach the minimum standards of playability (for your cube).
There are two real reasons I consider Buffalo desirable, and both relate to archetypes in cube. The third is a personal benefit I've found that you may consider relevant
The more players have to fight over cards during a draft, the more variance there will be between individual instances of the same 'deck' or 'archetype'. This solves an unfortunate element of overtuning towards archetypes, that of "choosing a lane" or "drafting on rails" - see Ixalan retail limited for why this is undesirable. Reducing the linearity of the drafting process while still encouraging decks to have a specific game plan is pretty high on my list of priorities
The more interactions a card can have during a game, the more decisions that will need to be made and the wider the possibility space for a deck that can use all the parts of the Buffalo. On a personal level, I also find that this makes that decision making process more rewarding, choosing (or discovering) 'the play' from a broader list of options is more enjoyable to me than jamming a powerful effect and this holds true for a (narrow) majority of my playgroup. This won't be true for everyone and there isn't a 'right' way here, so don't feel attacked if that's not your preference.
A side-effect of choosing to build via Buffalo rather than or in addition to via Archetype is the -designer- getting a chance to discover interactions in games rather than in curation. An example that happened to me was taking 10 through my defensive board when my opponent Hail-Mary'd Faithless Looting into a Liliana's Caress, then activated their Magus of the Wheel. I put all of those cards in the cube, I decided I wanted graveyard synergies and madness cards and cycling synergies and hand attack to all feature, yet I didn't specifically include that interaction as a "combo" for people to play. It's not an amazing combo by any stretch, but it's an out that particular deck had against me that particular game, it came up, and both I and my opponent found it pretty cool. In that very same draft, I was playing a grindy Green/Black aggro enchantress after my draft went a bit wrong, and Kruphix's Insight drawing Sarcomancy, Rancor and Boon Satyr while also binning a Gravecrawler felt pretty good. That's another 'archetype' that I did not deliberately build into the cube but was a way to rescue my draft thanks to the decision to choose cards for possibility space over power. Not every one of those cards is a Buffalo in my cube, but those that are enabled those that aren't.
We want to maximize interactions, so is a wall of text desirable? More words = more opportunities for them to be relevant, right? Well, no. Dance of the Dead is pretty wordy but in the end it doesn't have many more interactions than the (/slightly/ less wordy) Animate Dead or Necromancy. Unless you build your cube to take advantage of the difference in card type, none of them do meaningfully more than any other Reanimate effect either, or may even do less.
Modal spells all have to be Buffalo right? They do all sorts of things!
Well, Chaos Charm may do three things, but I doubt you care all that much about any of its modes in any given board state - after all how often do you /need/ to destroy target Wall? Honestly, Forked Bolt is a better modal spell than Chaos Charm. It can kill a bird, it can kill a bear, it can push damage, it can be a 2-for-1 in control decks and a burn spell in aggro ones.
Does that make Forked Bolt a Buffalo then? Well, not for those reasons - that's just a versatile card. All of that versatility and possibility space comes from one line of text. Doesn't mean it can't -be- a Buffalo though, as it's pretty contingent on the design space your cube occupies - if you have a "Spells Matter" deck, or a "Bloodthirst" deck, or a "CMC = 1 Matters" deck or whatever, you now have more parts of Forked Bolt to care about, more ways for it to do things - a Buffalo. If you don't, it's 'just' a very solid spell.
What are the main traits we care about here? Well, pretty much anything, as long as you consistently pay attention to the same characteristics and provide payoffs for them. Most commonly I care about the following:
(Super and Sub)Types
Zones it interacts with
Other permanents or effects it interacts with
Characteristics of other permanents or effects it interacts with
Lets take a card at random from Gatherer to see if it has the potential to be a Buffalo.
Types -
Creature: Pretty good, they do things I hear.
Homunculus: Oh well, we can't have everything.
Effects -
1U, Tap: Well, we aren't getting the effect cheaply, nor are we getting it straight away, but these are concerns for power level reasons than the breadth of possibility space. Maybe you care about the creature tapping - Umbral Mantle exists I guess?
Create a 2/2 blue Homunculus creature token: Ooh, we get a creature, and it's a bear! This is good.
Then sacrifice a creature: Even better! This fills the graveyard, triggers Morbid and Revolt, etc.
At the end of this exercise, we have a card with a universally relevant type, that makes something with a universally relevant type, that does things for two zones (the battlefield and the graveyard), interacts with itself in interesting ways (1/2 that can block and leave behind a 2/2? Even better, as long as you keep it around it gives you a free block every turn by sacrificing a chump and making a new one for next turn!) and has the potential to interact with other cards that care about the same zones or are triggered by it's ability. Seems like a Buffalo to me, at least in the context of Innistrad limited with its Morbid effects and its Gnaw to the Bones.
Should you jam it in your cube? That depends on whether you care about what it does and the costs at which it does them, which is why you need to be able to recognise Buffalo for yourself. If you're running Homunculus Tribal (in a cube where that's powerful enough to be an archetype), this is probably pretty far up there on your list of "cards with relevant interactions". On the other hand, if this card is competing with Thing in the Ice backed up by Snap and Snappy in a blue section stocked with instant and sorcery enablers and payoffs it's probably not going to pull its weight, as even irrespective of power level concerns it's just not doing anything in the same space as your other effects in blue.
Some examples of Buffalo from my cube:
1WW for a 2/2 lifelinking flier is okay at my cube's power level, certainly not embarrassing. It goes in both aggressive and defensive Enchantress builds thanks to the evasion and lifelink, while also pumping/triggering key effects. Its tutorable and recurrable in mono-W too, which is a nice benefit. It's also super sweet in decks that want to cheat things into play. It adds to the 'creature density' of a polymorph deck without adding a creature card so you can hit your fatties more reliably in the same way some token makers do. If you have any topdeck manipulation or tutoring, any flicker effect will cheat things into play that way too. Then we get to the super fringe - if the 2/2 dies, that's two cards in the yard for the price of one. Efficient? No. Relevant? Well, yeah actually. Delve is a hungry beast, so is Grim Lavamancer. An evasive creature that heals you is relevant in both control and aggro, as mentioned, so it's not unusual to see this paired with one of the above. The only part of that textbox I don't have a use for is the fact that the Manifest is colourless, but there are cards out that that could care about this if that's a route someone wanted to take.
I like this guy a lot. Okay, as a creature he's not great, but he's an option and there will be boards where you just need a decent body. He cycles, which has a whole host of interactions in my list - I run a fair few "whenever a player cycles/discards a card" effects. He puts himself in the 'yard, for the things that care about that - Living Death, Nemesis of Mortals, whatever. Here's where it gets less relevant to most people: He's 7 mana. I run a suite of cards that care about high CMC, but you can't just jam exclusively 7-11 mana spells and hope you don't die. A 7 mana "hit" for Combustible Gearhulk that also performs double-duty as an uncounterable cantrip that helps you -cast- those expensive spells should you need to is exactly what that deck needs - so much so that I also run Shefet Monitor and Elvish Aberration.
I was going to do a whole write-up on these, but there's nothing I wanted to say that hadn't already been said over in the "Comprehensive List of Cube Archetypes" Multi-Archetype All Stars section. For the two whole people who haven't checked that thread out, give it a read.
Limitations of Buffalo
There are some limitations to this approach, and I've run headlong into all of them in my ever-ongoing attempts to further tune my 360. The three major ones that have come up time and time again are:
Any increase in the amount or complexity of decisions in your game demands an increase in attentiveness, which isn't ideal for all players. I have had drafts where a player or players were tired, and the complexity of a draft where so many cards interact in so many ways with so many other cards was just too much for them. In iterations of the cube where I've had obvious and linear draft strategies present ("Humans" or "Gx Midrange") this hasn't been a problem, those players have opted-out of that level of attentiveness and still been involved in a draft where they have a stake and a decent deck at the end. In iterations where I'd gone overboard on complexity (or the draft hadn't aligned), and those linear strategies were either non-obvious or not present. If your cube drafts go long or late, there's also the possibility of previously attentive and engaged players to become less so should they reach a critical mass of complexity in their deck or gameplan. Anecdotally, this is solved by having clearly signposted linear strategies available, and seems to decrease as familiarity with Magic or the specifics of the cube increases - once players have a rote awareness of cards and aren't actively reading them every time they see them, this decreases. Having a "draft strategies", "list of archetypes" or "common combos" sheet may help, I've certainly tried the 'list of archetypes' before.
Once the complexity of a decision reaches a certain threshold, either because of the range of options available or the potential for unforeseen consequences, some players will deem it "too complicated" and opt out of making a decision at all. This seems to come from a fear of making the wrong decision. Decision paralysis may manifest in refusing to play a card until well after it was relevant, or in refusing to draft a card that has too many possible uses. In my experience it's always a negative for the player in question, leads to a bad feeling associated with drafting or cubing and should always be avoided. This one I don't have advice on. I've had a player relatively new to Magic draft my cube and just cast "Living Death" as a "Weird board wipe" that's gotten them there, and I've had an experienced drafter stare at the comparatively simple "Life from the Loam" and then just give up and pass it despite being in a green self mill deck that featured cycling lands. People are odd. Again, rote awareness seems to help.
The more complex the cube, the more unforeseen interactions that may arise, and the more room for those interactions, once discovered, to be oppressive. You may even be -aware- of an interaction and underrate its strength - this has happened to me more than once, sometimes bringing a niche interaction up to the standard of 'actual archetype", sometimes pushing something from 'not a deck' to 'how do I beat this?'. Unless something has gotten really wacky, just run broad enough answers. Answers don't have to be Buffalo. In fact, they probably shouldn't be. Sure, I run Ichor Slick and Complicate because they do cool things in the right deck. I also run Malicious Affliction and Counterspell because they do the job. They aren't oppressively powerful and mechanically dull cards, they're just simple and effective ways of dealing with things.
Well, that's about it for this nascent theory of mine. It's been a useful way to think about cards for me, and a way of breaking out of linear archetypes in my cube, and as such I wanted to share. Even if you don't take this approach (And I don't expect people to), I hope that it sparks new thought about card analysis on a different axis - ambitious, admittedly.
Thanks for reading
At the start of this post I mentioned not wanting to cube cards on the basis of power yet multiple times now have I commented on how cards need to be powerful enough to justify their inclusion. How do I reconcile these statements? Well, card power doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists in the context of other cards. Cube started as a way of playing with all of the best cards in magic, but has evolved to encompass every custom draft experience imaginable and I think we're much richer for it. I am of the opinion that if you picked the 360 objectively "most powerful" cards in Magic, you would end up with a pretty awful cube. My assumption is that Blue cards and Artifacts would be disproportionately represented, Red and White would be both shallow and narrow and the density of different effects, enablers, payoffs and mana costs would be all out of whack, with a heavy weighting towards payoffs and nowhere near enough set up or enablers. As a result, a lot of very powerful cards would not be in a position to show off the full extent of their power, and some may be stone cold duds in this hypothetical format. You would have assembled a list of powerful cards, sure, but would you have powerful feeling games? Probably not.
Yet, cubes that are designed around power level exist and are fun to draft. Their designers and curators have made /concessions/ on power level to show off power level; by including enough Savannah Lions they make Armageddon and Ravages of War both back-breaking and game ending; by including token makers they allow Opposition to be oppressive; in running second-string discard outlets they make turn 2 Griselbrand a real possibility. Even on a more fundamental level, just having a hard number of cards per colour is a restriction that prevents the inclusion of just "the best" 360 cards - after all what are the odds that, of "the best" 360, exactly 60 or so are Blue? So then, those who design around power make concessions for a playable draft environment.
I say that designing from the perspective of maximising power level is too harsh a limitation - if you have powerful feeling magic by excluding a subset "the most powerful cards", why can't you have powerful feeling magic regardless of that constraint at all? Why not build from the perspective of "What is the most interesting draft environment for my players", with the power level concern not being "how do I turn it up to 11" but instead "How do I level the playing field for as many decks as I can meaningfully support?", bringing power down not to show off how frustrating Jitte is in creature-based matchups, but instead to allow as many different decks and games as possible in your tiny box of wizard cards.
TBC
TBC
EDIT: My tags went all wonky, the post got very ugly, and I couldn't get the floats, links and boxes to work the way they were in the preview. Resorted to spoilers (And nested spoilers), hope it still reads well enough.
I know my experiences won't cleanly translate to everyone, so I figured I'd focus on the facet that I care most about and feel will have the most relevance, something I have dubbed Buffalo Cards.
In the same way we are told that native Americans used 'every part of the buffalo', so too can we use 'every part of the card'. The ideal Buffalo card is one where every part of its text leads is relevant or meaningful, or leads to neat interactions, decisions or discoveries. Ideally, this is also a diverse set of interactions that are relevant at different stages of the game so as to increase how attractive it is to each player during the draft. Is every Buffalo card good in every deck? Hell, is every Buffalo card "powerful"? No, but that's not the goal. The goal is to reduce the linearity of drafts and encourage players to fight over cards so the draft portion of your night is as interesting and interactive as the games. Ideally this will also be making the games themselves more interesting and interactive as well, by increasing the number of decisions made, the options available for those decisions, and allowing for new discoveries or "Aha!" moments. In order for this to happen the cards do have to be good enough to consider playing for power level reasons alone, but as cube power levels vary wildly I'm not going to consider that axis when listing examples later on.
Let's have a look at the text box of a generic fetchland and see just how much room there is for interaction.
Land.
(T), Sacrifice [CARDNAME]: Search your library
for a (land that meets condition), put it onto
the battlefield, then shuffle your library.
Ignoring the super obvious ("They fix your mana!"), there are a lot of potent effects taking place at a very competitive cost here, all at instant speed. You likely know all of this already, but for those who want or need it I'll deploy the ugly nested spoiler.
Sacrifice {CARDNAME}
Search your library
for a (land that meets condition)
put it onto the battlefield,
then shuffle your library.
From a power standpoint, you get all of this at the very very competitive cost of
- A draft pick
- Including a land in your deck, and
- Playing that land.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but these are all things that players have to do anyway. This obviously adds to the appeal, as for cards to be considered on the basis of versatility they need to reach the minimum standards of playability (for your cube).Modal spells all have to be Buffalo right? They do all sorts of things!
Well, Chaos Charm may do three things, but I doubt you care all that much about any of its modes in any given board state - after all how often do you /need/ to destroy target Wall? Honestly, Forked Bolt is a better modal spell than Chaos Charm. It can kill a bird, it can kill a bear, it can push damage, it can be a 2-for-1 in control decks and a burn spell in aggro ones.
Does that make Forked Bolt a Buffalo then? Well, not for those reasons - that's just a versatile card. All of that versatility and possibility space comes from one line of text. Doesn't mean it can't -be- a Buffalo though, as it's pretty contingent on the design space your cube occupies - if you have a "Spells Matter" deck, or a "Bloodthirst" deck, or a "CMC = 1 Matters" deck or whatever, you now have more parts of Forked Bolt to care about, more ways for it to do things - a Buffalo. If you don't, it's 'just' a very solid spell.
What are the main traits we care about here? Well, pretty much anything, as long as you consistently pay attention to the same characteristics and provide payoffs for them. Most commonly I care about the following:
(Super and Sub)Types
Zones it interacts with
Other permanents or effects it interacts with
Characteristics of other permanents or effects it interacts with
Lets take a card at random from Gatherer to see if it has the potential to be a Buffalo.
Types -
Creature: Pretty good, they do things I hear.
Homunculus: Oh well, we can't have everything.
Effects -
1U, Tap: Well, we aren't getting the effect cheaply, nor are we getting it straight away, but these are concerns for power level reasons than the breadth of possibility space. Maybe you care about the creature tapping - Umbral Mantle exists I guess?
Create a 2/2 blue Homunculus creature token: Ooh, we get a creature, and it's a bear! This is good.
Then sacrifice a creature: Even better! This fills the graveyard, triggers Morbid and Revolt, etc.
At the end of this exercise, we have a card with a universally relevant type, that makes something with a universally relevant type, that does things for two zones (the battlefield and the graveyard), interacts with itself in interesting ways (1/2 that can block and leave behind a 2/2? Even better, as long as you keep it around it gives you a free block every turn by sacrificing a chump and making a new one for next turn!) and has the potential to interact with other cards that care about the same zones or are triggered by it's ability. Seems like a Buffalo to me, at least in the context of Innistrad limited with its Morbid effects and its Gnaw to the Bones.
Should you jam it in your cube? That depends on whether you care about what it does and the costs at which it does them, which is why you need to be able to recognise Buffalo for yourself. If you're running Homunculus Tribal (in a cube where that's powerful enough to be an archetype), this is probably pretty far up there on your list of "cards with relevant interactions". On the other hand, if this card is competing with Thing in the Ice backed up by Snap and Snappy in a blue section stocked with instant and sorcery enablers and payoffs it's probably not going to pull its weight, as even irrespective of power level concerns it's just not doing anything in the same space as your other effects in blue.
Some examples of Buffalo from my cube:
1WW for a 2/2 lifelinking flier is okay at my cube's power level, certainly not embarrassing. It goes in both aggressive and defensive Enchantress builds thanks to the evasion and lifelink, while also pumping/triggering key effects. Its tutorable and recurrable in mono-W too, which is a nice benefit. It's also super sweet in decks that want to cheat things into play. It adds to the 'creature density' of a polymorph deck without adding a creature card so you can hit your fatties more reliably in the same way some token makers do. If you have any topdeck manipulation or tutoring, any flicker effect will cheat things into play that way too. Then we get to the super fringe - if the 2/2 dies, that's two cards in the yard for the price of one. Efficient? No. Relevant? Well, yeah actually. Delve is a hungry beast, so is Grim Lavamancer. An evasive creature that heals you is relevant in both control and aggro, as mentioned, so it's not unusual to see this paired with one of the above. The only part of that textbox I don't have a use for is the fact that the Manifest is colourless, but there are cards out that that could care about this if that's a route someone wanted to take.
I like this guy a lot. Okay, as a creature he's not great, but he's an option and there will be boards where you just need a decent body. He cycles, which has a whole host of interactions in my list - I run a fair few "whenever a player cycles/discards a card" effects. He puts himself in the 'yard, for the things that care about that - Living Death, Nemesis of Mortals, whatever. Here's where it gets less relevant to most people: He's 7 mana. I run a suite of cards that care about high CMC, but you can't just jam exclusively 7-11 mana spells and hope you don't die. A 7 mana "hit" for Combustible Gearhulk that also performs double-duty as an uncounterable cantrip that helps you -cast- those expensive spells should you need to is exactly what that deck needs - so much so that I also run Shefet Monitor and Elvish Aberration.
I was going to do a whole write-up on these, but there's nothing I wanted to say that hadn't already been said over in the "Comprehensive List of Cube Archetypes" Multi-Archetype All Stars section. For the two whole people who haven't checked that thread out, give it a read.
Limitations of Buffalo
There are some limitations to this approach, and I've run headlong into all of them in my ever-ongoing attempts to further tune my 360. The three major ones that have come up time and time again are:
Any increase in the amount or complexity of decisions in your game demands an increase in attentiveness, which isn't ideal for all players. I have had drafts where a player or players were tired, and the complexity of a draft where so many cards interact in so many ways with so many other cards was just too much for them. In iterations of the cube where I've had obvious and linear draft strategies present ("Humans" or "Gx Midrange") this hasn't been a problem, those players have opted-out of that level of attentiveness and still been involved in a draft where they have a stake and a decent deck at the end. In iterations where I'd gone overboard on complexity (or the draft hadn't aligned), and those linear strategies were either non-obvious or not present. If your cube drafts go long or late, there's also the possibility of previously attentive and engaged players to become less so should they reach a critical mass of complexity in their deck or gameplan. Anecdotally, this is solved by having clearly signposted linear strategies available, and seems to decrease as familiarity with Magic or the specifics of the cube increases - once players have a rote awareness of cards and aren't actively reading them every time they see them, this decreases. Having a "draft strategies", "list of archetypes" or "common combos" sheet may help, I've certainly tried the 'list of archetypes' before.
Once the complexity of a decision reaches a certain threshold, either because of the range of options available or the potential for unforeseen consequences, some players will deem it "too complicated" and opt out of making a decision at all. This seems to come from a fear of making the wrong decision. Decision paralysis may manifest in refusing to play a card until well after it was relevant, or in refusing to draft a card that has too many possible uses. In my experience it's always a negative for the player in question, leads to a bad feeling associated with drafting or cubing and should always be avoided. This one I don't have advice on. I've had a player relatively new to Magic draft my cube and just cast "Living Death" as a "Weird board wipe" that's gotten them there, and I've had an experienced drafter stare at the comparatively simple "Life from the Loam" and then just give up and pass it despite being in a green self mill deck that featured cycling lands. People are odd. Again, rote awareness seems to help.
The more complex the cube, the more unforeseen interactions that may arise, and the more room for those interactions, once discovered, to be oppressive. You may even be -aware- of an interaction and underrate its strength - this has happened to me more than once, sometimes bringing a niche interaction up to the standard of 'actual archetype", sometimes pushing something from 'not a deck' to 'how do I beat this?'. Unless something has gotten really wacky, just run broad enough answers. Answers don't have to be Buffalo. In fact, they probably shouldn't be. Sure, I run Ichor Slick and Complicate because they do cool things in the right deck. I also run Malicious Affliction and Counterspell because they do the job. They aren't oppressively powerful and mechanically dull cards, they're just simple and effective ways of dealing with things.
Well, that's about it for this nascent theory of mine. It's been a useful way to think about cards for me, and a way of breaking out of linear archetypes in my cube, and as such I wanted to share. Even if you don't take this approach (And I don't expect people to), I hope that it sparks new thought about card analysis on a different axis - ambitious, admittedly.
Thanks for reading
Yet, cubes that are designed around power level exist and are fun to draft. Their designers and curators have made /concessions/ on power level to show off power level; by including enough Savannah Lions they make Armageddon and Ravages of War both back-breaking and game ending; by including token makers they allow Opposition to be oppressive; in running second-string discard outlets they make turn 2 Griselbrand a real possibility. Even on a more fundamental level, just having a hard number of cards per colour is a restriction that prevents the inclusion of just "the best" 360 cards - after all what are the odds that, of "the best" 360, exactly 60 or so are Blue? So then, those who design around power make concessions for a playable draft environment.
I say that designing from the perspective of maximising power level is too harsh a limitation - if you have powerful feeling magic by excluding a subset "the most powerful cards", why can't you have powerful feeling magic regardless of that constraint at all? Why not build from the perspective of "What is the most interesting draft environment for my players", with the power level concern not being "how do I turn it up to 11" but instead "How do I level the playing field for as many decks as I can meaningfully support?", bringing power down not to show off how frustrating Jitte is in creature-based matchups, but instead to allow as many different decks and games as possible in your tiny box of wizard cards.
TBC
TBC
EDIT: My tags went all wonky, the post got very ugly, and I couldn't get the floats, links and boxes to work the way they were in the preview. Resorted to spoilers (And nested spoilers), hope it still reads well enough.