Natalie

closest I've got is a plantsona (nettle)

addendum: the hairdresser's child has assigned me "dolphin", but idk if it's gonna stick

closest I've got is a plantsona (nettle)

Over a decade of weekly-ish drafts! Here are a few of my design tentpoles:

• It should be approachable for cube beginners. This is something that's always relative, since cube itself is inherently a deeply complex format, but given that starting point I try to avoid stuff that's too weird on top. I try to avoid cards that imply an archetype is supported when it's not, I avoid textless or non-English cards (with a textless Lightning Bolt as the sole exception), and I avoid mechanics with way too much implicit text like Initiative or Ring Temptation. I recently removed cards that rely on the distinction between "choose" and "target" as well for similar reasons.

• Aggro should be viable but not dominant. Aggressive decks have a weird place in the history of cube, exacerbated by the fact that most cube designers don't track archetype performance. The "standard" cube build, especially early in my cube's lifetime, had a red section that was almost exclusively all-in burn and balls-to-the-wall aggro, maybe some white weenie cards at low CMC, and just a smattering of aggressive green or white cards. The result was that red and sometimes white aggro were crushingly poweful especially when uncontested, and all the other aggro cards were duds.

  Early in my cube's life, I started asking players to fill out "homework" to indicate their general color combination and match record. I'd then crunch these numbers and use them to understand how decks were performing. I found that red aggro was by far the best deck in the cube, so I decided to change things up by taking out all but the most iconic pure burn cards and trying to push red towards more cards that would be useful in aggro but competed for by other archetypes.

  I also make an active effort to make two-color aggressive archetypes, especially red/green, white/green, and white/blue viable. This helps make aggro part of the cube ecosystem—something vital for making it not devolve into midrange/combo soup—without it being paint-by-numbers while drafting.

• Make "combo" something that feels more mix-and-match than A+B. Most combo-style decks in my cube are either in the form of Twin or cheating out big creatures. But I try specifically to make these feel different every draft by giving each color that interacts with them a different flavor—you can throw Kiki-Jiki and Zealous Conscripts into an otherwise aggro deck as another angle of attack, or you can focus on the blue draw along with Pestermite/Exarch for a lot traditional control shell. Cheats can be U/B reanimator or G/R cheating from hand or a hybrid of the two. All of this helps each draft feel different than the one before.

  On the other hand, I generally don't have cards that do nothing at all without the context of one specific other card. This can be kind of interesting during the draft, but it's not very different from time to time, and there's plenty of room for something similar while still giving the cards utility in other angles.

• Don't make multicolor trivial. I keep a pretty careful eye on how much fixing the cube has. I want playing three colors to be a real cost, and I want the choice of lands versus spells in the draft to be a real strategic decision. There are only five triomes in the cube, and a limited number of other fetchable lands. This varies somewhat just to keep things fresh, but never so much that splashing is just free.

• Coffee: definitely my favorite of the three. Unfortunately, I'm intensely sensitive to caffeine so I really can't drink it regularly or my sleep schedule gets even more fucked than it is on its own and I get horrible anxiety. I do steal sips whenever my wife has a coffee, though, and now and then I'll damn the consequences and treat myself to a decaf.

• Tea: I respect tea a lot, but I do not enjoy it. Neither the flavor nor the texture are my cup of tea preference.

• Hot chocolate: Extremely high variance. Bad hot chocolate is really horrible, but a nice drinking chocolate on a cold day is pretty great. The best stuff is thick and intense so I don't want too much at once, but I do like it a lot.