It means playing things like Hallowed Moonlight in place of the more potent Containment Priest and that kind of thing. It is fairly easy to keep the aggressive decks back but you do have to pay attention to it. In a format focused around combo a control deck or aggro deck can run riot if you let it slip through the cracks. Keeping other non-combo game plans out of the equation was another big issue although it did help with keeping the card count down. That being said I run a massive amount of lands in my midrange cube so those that I have in the combo cube probably just look fairly normal to many people. This means you need more playable non-land cards from the draft as well further incentivizing a lower land count than normal. Being able to cast your spells is only relevant if you have a deck capable of winning! It is noteworthy that the average land count for decks built in the combo cube is over a land less than it is for my midrange cube, and probably closer to the two lands less mark.
You just need to have more picks and options on cards for your non-land cards to balance the deck consistency appropriately with the colour consistency. Much as I don't rate fixing any less in this format than for others picking up dual lands is a bit of a luxury. I played a lot less lands overall as well to further save space. An example is playing things like Vivid lands and most of the lands that tap for any colour in place of lands that just tap for two specific colours. This was done all over the place with a variety of strategies. This in turn meant that space efficiency was going to be important. For the midrange cube the difference between 540 and 720 is minimal and only really changes things in terms of the value of the good one drops! For the combo cube it felt much more important to stay close to the 540 mark. I have always liked a 540 minimum for variation and consistency balance. I find 360 card cubes or those little bigger to have very short longevity and draft in a less satisfying way. With many combos requiring specific cards you want to have a decent chance of seeing them in a draft. The most obvious one was that the cube shouldn't be too big. If that is of no interest then read no further! There were a lot of issues to overcome with this design project, some evident from the outset and others that arose through testing. The rest of this article will be covering some of the design choices and parameters of The Combo Cube. If you have the cards or are happy with proxies of some flavour then that is not an issue.
Even if you have an unpowered cube as a starting place you will need a lot more cards (400 or so) to make the change over and most of those cards are expensive for one reason or another. I don't think it the only thing you should play but I think mixing it in with your other Magic will increase the overall enjoyment! A great nostalgia trip as well for any longstanding players of the game.
I can thoroughly recommend it as a refreshingly different and fun way to play Magic. I took inspiration from a couple of other cube tutor lists, one of which was clearly very well tuned and loved. This is certainly not the first time this has been done. It is not as well tuned as it could be but it is a solid starting place to further refine from. The blog of the cube details much of these changes if any are interested in the design process. Here is the list I ended up with after much cutting and adding over the time. When I wanted to mix things up in the past I would do some sort of powered event, now I suspect I will lean towards commander style events or ones using this combo cube. It was also vastly closer in balance to my normal cube than it was to any silly powered cube I have played. It had that craziness without the one sided nature. I elected to use the exact same ban list that I use for my normal cube* essentially cutting the power from the equation yet it felt like powered cubes tend to feel. It was a delightfully refreshing change to my conventional cube and gave some memorable and exotic games. It was more polar and a little more random but it made up for that with vast diversity in game play and deck building. While it was certainly not as fair and balanced as my normal drafting cube it did exactly what I wanted it too by the end of the project. While there are many challenges in designing and balancing a combo cube the project was a resounding success. The premise is fairly simple, it is a cube that only supports combo archetypes. I have spent the last couple on months on a side project which as the title suggests is a combo cube.