So, this is an idea I've been floating around for a bit, and I thought it would make for a good slow burn project that we can, as a group, work on.
You see, there is one avenue of creation that we have, so far, well... not neglected, but haven't really tried to utilize. And that, my dear friends, is the concept of a bottom up world. And that's where the concept of the cube world came in. What we're going to do is compile a collection of cards, same as a cube, and then reverse engineer the flavor of the world by the interactions and concepts that appear in the cube.
Now, this is a fairly large undertaking, so I'm not expecting a sudden and explosive build, but rather just a slow build that will let us piece everything together nicely. Just a relaxing project for us to enjoy and something that everyone can contribute to without feeling like they have to stringently throw themselves into it for a long while yet.

Anyways, with that all being said, I'll now get to some of the breakdown:
1) Each of the colors will have 25 cards to play with and form a coherent picture with.
2) To pad out the numbers, each color will also have 5 artifact slots to influence the culture construction. Be sure to specify where the artifact belongs in the world.
3) Yet another factor is nonbasic lands, with each color having access to 2 special land slots.
4) Absolutely all suggestions will be taken initially. You have a favorite card? Go for it! As we amass more cards, I'll begin to limit rarities.
5) Proper names are going to be... weird. BUT, I'm willing to let things in to see if we can repurpose the proper names for other things. It's sketchy, and maybe a little uncomfortable, and truthfully I'd like to avoid it, but I am not going to believe there is only 1 Gerrard in all the multiverse.

So, I do think I'll start off by submitting a card here:
Lord of the Unreal
This one feels like it has some really great worldbuilding potential in a few different directions. It also, I think, nails down some early identity to focus certain aspects o the blue section on.

I also went ahead and did the number break down for rarity, including the artifact numbers for each color.
2 Mythic
4 Rare
8 Uncommon
16 Common

For a total of 30 cards in each color.

This seems cool. I'll throw in a couple cards, I guess.

Cloistered Youth, based solely on the fact that she's my favorite card.

Maul Splicer, because green artifact love is weird, and I like to throw wrenches at design processes.

Seething Song, because... I don't actually know. I just like it, and it feels right. So, yeah.

I'm just going to shout out some favorite cards, and whatever looks like a cool possibility for a flavor source. some green cards.

Mycoloth!!!!!
Mitotic Slime
Life's Legacy
Sporogenesis
Deathreap Ritual
Grove of the Burnwillows


If cards have names that are too world-specific, we can always have the equivalent of functional reprints.

Not a bottom-up suggestion but it would be funny if we made the world actually cubic, in a way that makes sense.

Oy... okay, so... some of the details seemed to have been missed on this.

For one, I didn't mean a huge slab of cards in one go because that makes things difficult. I was thinking at most 5 or so cards at a time so we could suss out the kind of environment it could generate and... y'know, let other people fill in some of the other slots. I suppose I should have specified, but I honestly didn't think people would dump the ENTIRE color block and the mechanical identity for it in one go...

Besides that, CKY, you also have a lot of artifacts, but you didn't specify WHERE they were supposed to go for color identity.

Good god, I do not like being this guy... I don't like shooting down people's ideas when I've opened it up, but this is just too much and quickly became way too narrow since virtually all of the color mechanics have been cemented within 3 posts. And no... I didn't want to cherry pick suggestions. I wanted to roll with what suggestions came as they did, but like I said, I didn't think people would dump entire chunks of the cube all at once.

I guess I'm going to call this a failure. Poor planning or wording on my part.

All WOTC cards or is NGA stuff good too?
I guess the big question is just what would cause a world to be shaped like that? Sounds like an artificial plain to me.
Maybe we can work with the six sides? That's the 5 colours plus artifacts or multicolour.

I really was going to make it a literal cube.
But artifacts weren't going to be distinct, rather interwoven with the colors to give some differentiation that might not have been present otherwise and I wasn't going to use any multicolor because that ended up complicating things.

WotC only cards.
It's all academic at this point though since, like I said, I wasn't expecting people to define entire portions by themselves.

I think the color identity thing for artifacts is silly. Artifacts are artifacts; the entire point is that all colors can use them. If you want them to lean more strongly to a certain color, I don't really care; that's up to you to decide.

In any case, I think it would be interesting for the cube to be a certain way, so I picked out as many cards I could find that reinforced that theme. That way we don't have to spend weeks coming up with new suggestions for the theme 5 at a time. You can go in a different direction if you want though.

The thing is, this was a way to make the flavor stand out. Altar of the Brood is obviously a Sultai card, but as an artifact, anybody could use it... but there's no question which clan it belongs to.
It was sort of the point to put the theme together slowly so that the flavor could come together from the crowd one piece at a time. There isn't a whole lot else going on right now, so a huge part of this was actually to take our time.
The way you put it together makes the entire thing morphcentric and takes away all the actual worldbuilding by only focusing on that. It removes the crowd participation from the equation.

I mean, I'm really not trying to be mean cky. I think you're cool and do solid work, but it's just directly contrary to what I was hoping we'd accomplish.

I might try to reboot things in a week or two, but right now....

Well, I guess I can check "destroy a community project" off my bucket list. *sigh*

Hey now, I may be the person who usually immediately gives up, but this ain't a disaster. I cut my post down to just 6 green cards. CKY you could also reduce your post to the 4-6 you really want to suggest first. We can keep going.

White: Chromatic Sphere
Blue: Crystal Ball
Black: Chaos Orb
Red: Triangle of War
Green: Doubling Cube

I'd honestly rather take a massive flood of cards and whittle our way down from that number. Slow and steady design processes are less fun, and it's much more interesting to find affinities between cards that you have in front of you and occasionally toss some out than to slowly add ideal cards.

I mean I also don't understand how Cube works. And I have never in my life bought singles--I always buy packs. And I tend to build decks based on whatever cards jump out at me at the time.

Basically I'm the biggest scrub the world has ever known.

But the point is that getting a flood of cards at once and working with a subset of them actually fits much better with my way of interacting with information creatively than the alternative, so for me this doesn't look like a failure, it looks like a rousing success.

The biggest thing about that is I very specifically didn't want to turn down any cards. I didn't want to reject anything because I wanted to see how things would come into shape as we went along rather than chip away in relief.
I wanted clay more than marble.

Yeah honestly I thought that's probably what you were going for and that's why I like... didn't actually consider the possibility that I could participate?

Like I said, I know nooooothing about building a Cube and if all of my suggestions are accepted we're boned because I guarantee they will be terrible.

See, that's actually one of the good things about doing cube since it is a simulated limited environment. It means you can have awful cards like Mindless Null to poison the environment to keep things a bit more balanced. It's also one of the reasons I stressed the rarity layout so that it would match closer to what one would find in a limited pool, otherwise it could be a cube of nothing but busted ass rares.


iiiiiinteresting. There's already some very good potential in these choices already. I can already see how some of these can be used to shape flavor.

And on that note, I'll add Eyes of the Watcher to add some more bulk to accompany Crystal Ball.
Banners Raised to help gel some aspects brought by the triangle.
The chaos orb is an odd choice in black, but it's one of the earliest cards I remember, so it makes for a compelling inclusion.
The rest I am still thinking on, but this feels like a good start now.


Could... I maybe have you narrow down to just one rare? Otherwise we're looking at the entire rare section of green filled out in one go.
Aside from that, and I seriously don't like having to say no (even if I have done that so much... I really hate that and I want to apologize to everyone again) but the multicolor bit kind of steps outside the build's numbers. So, the Grove and Ritual can't come along unfortunately.

I want to specify too that Moonbeam's Maul Splicer and Seething Song are in. I hadn't said much about that, but those two are in.

Best I can do to restrain myself is name 3 per color.

Umbra Mystic
Blessing of the Nephilim
Spectra Ward

Ocular Halo
Riddlekeeper
Lost in a Labyrinth

Halo Hunter
Crypt Angel
Darkest Hour

Blood Moon
Bloodhall Ooze
Bearer of the Heavens

Slime Molding
Miming Slime
Helix Pinnacle

Angelheart Vial
Amulet of Avarice
Lens of Clarity

While some are just some likeable cards imo, it's a little subtle but I'd love a little angelic sub-theme + exploring something closer to accurate definitions of nephilim (tho perhaps with some extrapolation into merfolk/vedalken/elf/goblin and angel offspring.) The rest can be interpreted as you please.

Agh!... Too much! It eats up SO MUCH of the rare space in black and red!
New rule, no more than 1 rare in each color per submission.
You also submitted more than 3 for at least 1 color considering the artifacts count towards the color totals.
(Ocular Halo is disqualified btw. Off color activation puts it in multicolor.)

I keep trying my best to avoid vetoing cards, but Lens of Clarity kind of retreads Crystal Ball except it cares about morph too, which so far there aren't any morph cards. I'm a little iffy on Riddlekeeper too since it references planeswalkers, and this won't have any walkers in it. That one might still fly.

Killing the Nephilim concept though. Angels don't produce offspring in Magic. (and there are only mono color cards in it so... Blessing doesn't really do a lot.)

I just don't understand Barinellos. Are we building flavor ideas, or only mechanical interactions? It appears completely impossible to have both.

I'm not Melvin. I don't know how to build mechanical decks this way so I guess I can't participate at all.