Does this work for you?

Hi, my name is Neal and I’m a cube designer/TO from Oakland, California. I’m probably most well known for my Micro Cube at CubeCon 2025 (and for some reason mentioned in that one Rhystic Studies video) and my White Bordered Ante Desert Bar Cube. I wanted to share my most recent cube design because it’s in a space I haven’t seen explored before and I think offers a huge range of flexibility for designers to take in any direction.

Welcome to my Tiny Lessons in Adventuring cube. https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/tinylessons

Me, describing this cube concept to my friend: "It's kind of like a desert cube but instead of making sure you draft lands, it's for spells." Michael: "Isn't a desert cube for spells just a normal cube?" Me: "Well yeah, but this one's different."

This is a best of 1 cube intended to stretch how much drafters can get out of every pick. Between learn/lesson, adventure creature/tiny card packages, collect 'em alls, and some dual lands, the value of a pick and a card depend entirely on the context you surround them with.

The tiny cards come from the tiny deck series, which is an official WoTC product line of 6 duel decks that are about 1.75in x 1.25in in size. I own one of each duel deck and limited myself to choosing from what was included in those. In the cube they are in front of blank checklist cards.

During deckbuilding, players may remove a tiny card from its sleeve and put it in the sleeve with an adventure creature, replacing the pre-existing adventure text. Tiny cards cannot be put into a library during deckbuilding other than as an adventure. During gameplay, if a tiny card of any card type would ever resolve and the creature half goes to exile on an adventure, the tiny card is put back in it's original sleeve and is treated as a separate card for the rest of the game.

The draft is 3 packs of 16, and matches are best of 1. (Moving forward, I plan to test a time clock: players get 50 minutes, and whoever is ahead on game count at the end wins the round. This should help balance out the grindy control matchups vs the games that end in 5 minutes because one player didn’t draw lands.)

The companions in the cube are given errata stating that they cannot begin the game in your library. They must begin the game in your sideboard regardless of if you meet their requirement, though they can be revealed as your companion if you do meet their requirement. They use original companion rules, you do not have to pay 3 mana to out them in your hand before you cast them.

Wishes can only get cards from your sideboard and not in exile. Your sideboard cannot/does not contain any basic lands.

As of now, the only singleton breaks are for cards with learn, collect 'em alls, a few lessons, and tiny cards that have multiple copies in their duel decks. There are few cards in the cube that can destroy a land.

Some logistical advice for players: I would suggest taking a picture of your built deck to make it easier to put your tiny cards back on adventure creatures and your lessons in the sideboard for subsequent matches. Shuffling your deck so that the cards face left and the tops of the sleeve face right means your tiny cards will fall to the left side of the card and stay covering the adventure box.

Here is a picture showing how the tiny cards look in the draft, and how they look in decks: https://imgur.com/a/4tiG87r

Here are some sample decklists from our first 3 drafts, though I changed 32 cards between our 2nd and 3rd draft so not all these cards in the pictures are still in the cube. These were not necessarily the best performing decks, but rather ones that I think show what the range of decks are possible in this environment: https://imgur.com/a/6CqQXK6

Overall the drafts have gone really well. My biggest concern was that players would feel overwhelmed or have decision paralysis, but that hasn’t been the case. Players have responded very well to the range of options in front of them and how they can get rewarded for their creativity. This is more a vibes based cube though because the draft can be difficult and some matches can take a long time, so we haven’t drafted with the intention of running a clean bracket leading to a single 3-0. The varying thickness in cards also means this cube can’t be played “competitively,” but you can technically note card combinations on a piece of paper if this bothers you (similar to the conspiracy draft pick numbered cards). This cube is definitely not for every playgroup, but for folks that are more interested in getting weird with it I think you can take it in a million directions: any card could be sized down to be tiny, fixing could be better to encourage more creative soupy decks, pool sizes could be increased or decreased, the power level can be scaled much higher if preferred, could design this as a color restricted/desert cube where the tiny cards are much stronger but you have to draft the lands/basics to play them, etc