Green - Elves
Red - goblins
Blue - merfolk/faeries???
Black - zombies
White - ???

Green - Elves, Beasts
Red - Goblins
Blue - Merfolk/Faeries
Black - Zombies
White - Soldiers (Or Birds, or Knights)
Gold - Slivers

If you don't mind multicolor, then:
BW: Clerics
Wrub: Soldiers
GB: Elves
BGR: Goblins
BW: Rebels

Slivers works in my pauper cube. Naturally there's stronger slivers at the higher rarities. However, there's way more sweepers at the higher rarities and slivers obviously don't do well in a cube with a lot of wrath effects.

Rebels are a lot stronger than they seem. If you get the whole chain and then a control shell you don't have to ever do anything on your turn. May result in tables getting flipped, though.

Some of the better changelings are quite good, so feel free to toss them in.

quote:

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Originally posted by A1phaMale:
So, I want to add a bit of flavor to my cube by having about 10-20% of a card color as a creature type.

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not to rain on your parade too hard, but i've done this and seen it done, and it almost never works. considering a 540 card cube, with 40 lands, 20 artifacts, and 40 multicolored cards, that leaves you with 440/5 spells per color. thats 88 white cards. if you make 20% of them white soldiers, you have 18 total. some of them are going to be 'filler', like elite vanguard, and nobody is going to want to commit early unless they hit something amazing. also, if you draft with 8 people, you still only use 2/3's of the cube, meaning now there are only 12 soldiers in the pool. you either have to pump your cube up to 40% tribal to support it, or you're going to have very underpowered tribal decks, with most people ignoring them completely.

quote:

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Originally posted by thror:
not to rain on your parade too hard, but i've done this and seen it done, and it almost never works. considering a 540 card cube, with 40 lands, 20 artifacts, and 40 multicolored cards, that leaves you with 440/5 spells per color. thats 88 white cards. if you make 20% of them white soldiers, you have 18 total. some of them are going to be 'filler', like elite vanguard, and nobody is going to want to commit early unless they hit something amazing. also, if you draft with 8 people, you still only use 2/3's of the cube, meaning now there are only 12 soldiers in the pool. you either have to pump your cube up to 40% tribal to support it, or you're going to have very underpowered tribal decks, with most people ignoring them completely.

you could probably get away with a 40% tribal saturation for 1-2 colors. red goblins could do it. but if you're doing a true cube, that still means only 1 warchief/piledriver/matron/ringleader. sometimes it won't come together, and that might leave the guy that tried to draft goblins feeling like you tricked him into drafting a crappy deck.

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This was one of the things I was most worried about so I'm glad you brought that up.

So, now I have one more question. What are your thoughts about having only one big creature theme that spans all colors. The best creature type I can think of that meets those requirements is slivers and I think I could get about 50 or so in the cube which will be about 10-15% of the entire cube, so about one sliver in every pack.

I think that would be fun, any input or anyone see it work?

Possibly more skill-intensive as "normal" cube is quite often about who got the bombiest bomb.

I originally created the cube with all 5 colors having a tribe, though blue faeries quickly became a problem as there's not much selection of faerie lords and most faeries just suck. I kept spellstutter sprite, bitterblossom, and cloud of faeries because those cards are fine on their own.

Later on, I found Black zombies to be a problem as it felt weird for black to have an aggro tribe archtype. Most times drafting black I was going for reanimator or combo, or just splashing for removal/tutors and the zombies were just getting in the way.

The other three colors however inherently are aggro colors (or at least lend themselves very well to the archtype), and in addition Elves, Goblins, and Soldiers have many options that are good outside of the tribe.

Llanowar elves (or any functional reprint) is a great elf but doesn't have to be in a tribal deck so it serves more than just tribal. Many other cards exist like this including elite vanguard, goblin war marshal, akrasan squire etc.

Then for the lordish type cards there are things like Imperious perfect, which by itself is completely fine (great, even), and in a deck with 5 or more elves its fantastic. Priest of Titania is okay on it's own, two mana accelerator, but with a few more elves in the deck it's better.
Champion of the Parish is not a lord necessarily, but does require to be in a deck with a good amount of humans which is not hard in a white aggro shell. And if most of your creatures happen to be soldiers anyway, stuff like Veteran swordsmith start to look a bit better.
Goblins is a bit more tough, most of the goblin lord cards are all in type cards, and goblins as a tribe is usually trying to swarm anyway so anything that supports a token archtype also supports goblins.

Beyond that you have your strict lords. Elvish Champion and Archdruid, Field Marshal and Auriok Steelshaper, Goblin King and Chieftain.

Sure, those cards are dead if you're not in the tribe but it's not like it's only a few cards per the whole cube. Not only that, but drafts should have a few cards that are archtype specific and if you're already going elves and you see that lord in the third pack you get excited and know it's gonna table as many times as you send it because no one else is going elves.

I really can't stand cubes that are just super overpowered and 'all goodstuff' packs where every single card is playable as long as you're going that color. It's all about sweepers and big creatures, there's very little skill involved in searching out synergies between cards.

I believe in multiples in cubes as well. Why not? There's multiples in booster drafts. I only mean cards that don't really have a functional reprint, or that fit a specific archtype like Life from the Loam (2x), Faithless Looting (4x - sure there's similar red and blue cards but the flashback is really key here), Mox diamond (3x), Sol ring (4x - why should only one person get to have it? THAT to me, is overpowered), Goblin Welder (2x), Steel Overseer (2x), Etched Champion (2x), Champion of the Parish (3x), Mogg War Marshal (2x), Priest of Titania (2x), Maze of Ith (2x - the other 'maze' cards are no good) Strip Mine (4x) etc etc.

The beauty of cube is you can do whatever you want and tweek it to fit your play group's preferences.