https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/RAVTSPStandard
This is the first (and to this date, only) cube I’ve created, designed to convert my RAV-TSP Standard gauntlet into something more accessible. I’ve submitted it for CubeCon 2025, mostly as an excuse to complete a testing cycle with it and make a half decent writeup. The primary goal is immersing people in the cards and strategies of my first “real” Standard format, which covered a wide range of macro-archetypes and utilized both staples and archetype specialist cards.
For the most part, during this meta I was locked into aggressive decks for budget reasons. I moved slowly between red aggro decks, selling off any spare parts for the core and slowly building the rest. I got lucky around the time of Planar Chaos’s release and barely scraped into the top 8 of a twelve person Magic Scholarship series event at 1-2-1. Hot draws into slower decks took me through to the finals, where I lost to the same Boros deck but with fewer janky budget substitutions. Second place earned me a $500 scholarship and an invite to the MSS championship in Baltimore, where I played a Jund aggro deck with Dark Confidant, Hit//Run, and as many Tarmogoyfs as I could borrow. While the players at my local events were generally restricted in the same ways I was, at this event I saw deck after deck I was enamored with, the pinnacle of which was the Jeskai Blink-Touch deck. Its ability to quickly snap from a midrange board-control plan to sending 15 points at your opponent’s face upended a lot of what I thought I understood about Magic and the metagame clock. These fair decks with a combo plan (and combo decks with a fair plan) made up a significant portion of the meta (with OmniChord and Project X both putting up results), but straightforward aggro decks, hard control, and pure midrange were all totally playable as well. If that ideal can be communicated via cube is far from certain, but I gotta try!
The initial stab I made at this cube (back in 2018 oop) was extremely structured, trying to spreadsheet out card slots and archetypes in a very traditional way (as I did not yet know that if you use slots when designing a cube you are a big dumb doodoo person). I was immediately struck with awful analysis paralysis, and any kind of potential disruption to the slots made it worse. After a few weeks of abortive attempts to progress, I ended up shelving the concept for years. Then on a random weekday night in February, I deduped 20ish decklists from the era, added the result to CubeCobra, and cut it down to 360 cards. It needed a lot of work, but getting it draftable made the cube so much easier to iterate on. My main concern with this cube is if the ‘correct’ avenues are things people will naturally be drawn down. In my first playtest with the cube, players felt left afloat, and while they made competent decks and the gameplay was fun, they were mostly building the type of decks you would expect to see in a generic cube made of Ravnica and Time Spiral cards. Each big revision seems to increase the number of “signpost” type cards, and my second playtest had a lot more success along these lines, but it’s very easy to overestimate how much knowledge players will have of these ancient combos and archetypes. The ultimate goal is balancing the emergent properties of cube draft with the historical reenactment element (aka the JNCO factor). The diversity within powerful cards of this era is a great tool for that, but if the players can’t reach that point without a full 2007 immersion program, I’ll need to do more work.
I mention this in my CubeCobra writeup, but shoutout to the (long defunct) blog killing a goldfish for these incredible articles about Ravnica and Time Spiral blocks. The Ravnica article captures a lot of what I loved about this era of Standard, and offers some explanations of how this state was reached. The Time Spiral article draws an excellent distinction between nostalgic media and media that critically reflects on itself and its past, as well as diving into some of the same frustrations I feel about Magic and the way card and product design have worked in the time since the block’s release.