I have to give credit where credit is due. Emma Handy did a beautiful job designing the Proliferate Cube. The gameplay is wild, complex, and novel. The draft provides so many different paths to explore. I feel like I could draft this Cube every day for at least a year before it would start feeling repetitive.
Given that it’s only on Magic Online for a week, I can’t speak to its balance. It’s possible a small subset of strategies should prove better than the rest. But this Cube is so fun, I honestly don’t even care and I would rather explore all the novel strategies and lose more. This Cube provides a flexible environment. It is what you make of it.
If I had to guess, like in most Cubes, potent monocolored aggressive strategies and multicolor good-stuff strategies are likely to be the most consistent archetypes that perform well. And I’m confident that they’re good in this Cube because I can attribute most of my losses to them. But if you want my advice, don’t draft them. They’re not the reason to draft the Proliferate Cube. You can draft those decks in any Cube, and this one offers a plethora of unique archetypes. If you’d like to review the surface of what this Cube has to offer, Emma Handy wrote a very nice piece on the matter, and Ryan Overturf even took that a bit further in a great article last week.
For me, this Cube is all about novel interactions between cards. How often do you get to go pseudo-infinite with Yawgmoth, Thran Physician and two undying creatures? Or sacrifice a bunch of artifacts to Atog in order to one-shot your opponent? Take advantage of the short time left in this wonderful environment to win with Magic cards that you rarely have the opportunity to see side-by-side.
In my opinion, persist combo and Affinity-style decks are the best archetypes this Cube has to offer within the novel framework. But much more than that is viable. Let’s jump into a draft and try and carve out a super-sweet deck!
Pack 1, Pick 1
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Pack 1, Pick 4
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