Cube Spotlight Series: CubeCon Cartographia

Posted on Oct 17, 2022

The Cube Spotlight Series returns with themes near and dear to my heart—geography and exploration. The power of lands shines in this offering, which will be live for a week on Magic Online starting October 19 at 10 a.m. Pacific (17:00 UTC). Here's designer John Terrill to illuminate the wonders of CubeCon Cartographia.

For a video presentation of this article, check out John's YouTube channel.

Welcome, intrepid explorer, to CubeCon Cartographia, a mapmaker's paradise! It is up to you to chart a course through a land marked by unstable and shifting terrain, powerful enchantments, arcane artifacts, and a whole menagerie of ferocious creatures. Apply your draughtsman's craft to Magic drafts, for you will draw a map anew each time you venture into this realm.

I'm John Terrill of the Cultic Cube YouTube channel. I am delighted to bring a second cube to the wonderful Cube Spotlight Series on Magic Online! I'm one of the organizers of CubeCon, a celebration of my favorite format being held in Madison, Wisconsin this weekend—concurrent with CubeCon Cartographia's appearance on MTGO. I hope that this cube allows those of you who aren't able to attend CubeCon to share in the joy of exploring new Cube environments!

CubeCon Cartographia is a cube that encourages you to find novel ways of plotting out decks whose pieces work in harmony. The format is defined first and foremost by its deep access to lands. We stray from the path of Cube tradition by breaking Singleton for fetch lands—there are two copies of each fetch land here. Mana fixing is very good! Moreover, we have many lands that do things, from destroying permanents and making tokens to buying back your graveyard. This abundance of lands allows more of your draft picks to find their way into your main deck instead of languishing in the sideboard.

A second hallmark of the cube is its number of planeswalkers: zero! Here, you construct your own 'walker-like value machines through the interaction of cards in your deck. Resilient engines that produce turn-over-turn value while dodging creature removal are available, and you'll find these in categories such as enchantments, artifacts, and, well, lands!

Enchantments run wild across the land of CubeCon Cartographia, and the terrain fairly hums with magical energy. The enchantress archetype is one that you can absolutely explore here. It's based in Bant colors, but there are deep options for enchantments across the color pie. This strategy can be tuned for explosive, all-in power that suits up enchantment creatures and leverages inexpensive enchantments that affect the board to continue beating down.

Alternatively, the enchantment archetype can play a long game, controlling the board and assembling overwhelming value through the interaction of its non-creature enchantments. Magic runs deep in this world! Sweep away your opponents' creatures and allow your enchantments to work in concert to compose a fresh army.

If cold steel and coiled springs are more your speed, artifacts abound in CubeCon Cartographia. Artifacts offer one of the routes to an aggressive strategy, as prototypical Red Deck Wins decks and their cousins aren't supported in quite the same way here as in traditional cubes. Our format is rife with inexpensive colorless creatures. Moreover, red and white both offer creatures that interact with artifacts or improve when surrounded by them. Blue boasts tools to animate otherwise lifeless lumps of ore. Black, red, and white support self-sacrificial Aristocrats strategies that can be built with artifact sacrifice in mind.

Many hopeful archaeologists visit CubeCon Cartographia in search of rather more ostentatious artifacts than Gingerbrutes and Bomat Couriers. Ever more exciting discoveries reward careful excavation, and the patient archaeologist may unearth monumental treasures.

If we are to support archetypes whose tools range across the colors, we need access to good mana! This imperative motivates our inclusion of a generous number of fixing lands. If you want your mana base to be reliable, you should be able to realize that dream, though you'll still have to make difficult decisions about when to take the land or the spell. In this realm, while decks may be colorful, individual cards tend to be monocolor. Multicolor cards are in comparatively meager supply here, and they serve specific roles rather than being generically powerful versions of replaceable effects. These multicolor cards often act as bridges between various archetypes.

You can play a two- or three-color deck and prioritize having excellent mana. Such an approach unlocks, for instance, a classic Zoo deck, defined by aggressive and over-statted creatures, often in Naya or Jund colors. Zoo decks offer an aggressive strategy that is built on a flexible mana base. Your menagerie may, after all, prove fragile if your deck struggles to find in-color mana sources on time.

Of course, you can take a greedier approach to drafting lands by snapping off a whole bevy of fixing to support a Rainbow deck. Your payoffs won't lie so much in Cube-staple gold spells but rather in the best of what the single colors have to offer, as well as in a complement of color-intensive powerhouses, such as The Kami War and Omnath, Locus of Creation. Moreover, a deck with an immoderate mana base may capitalize on domain strategies.

Lands not only allow you to cast your spells, but they can also win games on their own. Dark Depths combo is available, as is Field of the Dead (though no Golos!). There are creature lands aplenty, which are awesome, resilient threats on their own and can be improved with tools such as Tatyova, Steward of Tides and Sylvan Advocate.

Many more creatures exist that love lands, such as Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer; Titania, Protector of Argoth; and The Gitrog Monster. Lands in general and lands that put themselves in the graveyard are beloved of innumerable spells in the CubeCon Cartographia, such as those which rely on mechanics like landfall, domain, delve, revolt, and delirium.

It has been an enormous pleasure developing and playtesting this cube with many friends who are brilliant cube designers. The cube was born of late-night brainstorming with CubeCon colleagues Gwen Dekker and Jonathan "TeamJbro" Brostoff. I was honored to have friends join later who devoted many hours to intensive conversation about the cube: Elliott "Sniffygull," Derek Gallen, Brandon Harrison, Dan Schneider, and David White. Soon thereafter, we began playing in earnest, aided enormously by the deep insights of Paul Baranay, Zach Barash, Chill MTG, Richard Dietz, Wilson Fisher, Usman Jamil, JuliusF, Parker LaMascus, David McDarby, Brad Vanhook, and Jon Westoff. I am deeply thankful to the wonderful cadre that has developed a hazy topography into a dynamic landscape!

I can't wait to see what exciting new coordinates you chart as you explore CubeCon Cartographia! If I don't see you at CubeCon, be sure to Tweet your sweet builds to me. Here's to dizzying vistas, sublime prospects, and the magic of Cube Draft!

John Terrill
Twitter: @CulticCube
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/culticcube

FULL CUBECON CARTOGRAPHIA CARD LIST