With the current lull in digital Cubes and Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty still not fully previewed, I get to spend this week sharing one of my personal projects. I haven’t made it a secret that modular Twoberts have been a focus of mine lately, and we even discussed the concept at length on a recent episode of The 540. In that conversation I posited that it was possible to construct three Twoberts to be played independently or together in any combination without breaking singleton. Today, I will be sharing my findings on a Cube environment comprised of four such modules.

This was always my intention when I started working on my first modular Twobert project, though working on four modules takes considerably more effort than two, and making two work in a satisfying way was an important first step. There’s a lot to go over today regarding what I refer to as “The Hyper Cube” and I won’t get into the design process too much today, but I will reiterate the point I made on the podcast that working on each of the modules simultaneously was incredibly important to reduce instances of reworking things, as well as for keeping my perspective on the final project instead of getting too invested in any individual module.

The Hyper Cube

A lot of The Hyper Cube is a redesign of combinations of cards and archetypes that I’ve been satisfied with previously, but the extra parameters required introducing some new elements. When I started working on the project I wasn’t confident that four modules was a realistic number. I knew three was doable, but the upper limit without breaking singleton while maintaining a power level that I enjoyed realistically couldn’t be higher than four just based on existing land cycles. In fact, the first step I took to design the Cube was to separate land cycles and to identify central themes that I could construct four modules around using these lands.

I didn’t always have clean and presentable names for the four modules, but I eventually landed on a convention that I really like. These names are as such, and the hyperlink will take you to their respective Cube Cobra pages:

I identified having an aggressive and a controlling module as an elegant pair to include in a three-module design on The 540 to mix and match with some aesthetic design. Here, the build-around and devotion modules provide two different offerings on that front. It took quite a while to get a full list of 720 cards together and a bit more time to solidify these lists, and without lowering the power level or breaking singleton, I feel confident in saying that aiming to have more than four modules would be far more taxing than it’s worth. I got a little fancy to even make this size work by ruling “all basic lands are snow permanents” to include cards like On Thin Ice and Ice-Fang Coatl.

The Hyper Cube in Practice

Each of these modules is designed to be drafted as its own Twobert for the purpose of two- to four-player drafts, and combining two or more will facilitate drafts of six to sixteen players. Personally I’m not one to draft with more than eight players, but that is a logistical possibility here in addition to featuring four radically different two- to four-player environments. If you get into the various combinations, The Hyper Cube actually facilitates fifteen(!) different Cube environments.

Some groups are perfectly happy drafting 720- or more-card Cubes without breaking things down into modules, but if you’re like me, then this controlled variance adds quite a lot of value to the experience in terms of increasing player agency and reducing the uncontrolled variance that Cubes of this size typically introduce. Beyond that, the paper drafts that I do these days are generally with two or four players, so having more styles of Twoberts has been my solution to keeping things fresh and engaging.

Now let’s look under the hood and see what makes these four Twoberts tick!

The Aggro Module

The A and B modules for The Hyper Cube are largely made up of ideas featured in my first go at a modular Twobert and my Tempo Twobert. In fact, this module was originally referred to as “the tempo module” until I landed on the alphabetical naming convention. The aggro module doesn’t have the aesthetic concerns of the Tempo Twobert though, so we see fewer cards that lead to Legacy-like games (sorry, Nimble Mongoose) and more cards that are good on rate that you’d play in an aggressive Cube deck. This opens the door for some Cube all-stars like Hero of Bladehold and Hellrider.

This module doesn’t feature sweepers or controlling planeswalkers, and largely tasks players with carving a path to be the beatdown. That said, there are still some value cards like Treasure Cruise and Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger in the spread to facilitate taking a controlling role, as well as a healthy amount of removal to stop the largest creatures from completely taking over games.

The Lands

This module gets fetchlands and shocklands, which is important for facilitating the Death’s Shadow decks. It also means that this module has the best mana-fixing of the lot. This allows players to consistently be able to cast their one-drops on Turn 1, which is most important in the most aggressive decks. This module also has a slight imbalance in mana-fixing lands by featuring the enemy-color Horizon lands, though many decks in this environment play them despite their color-fixing ability and not because of it.