Not every cube gets built around power level. Some are built around a feeling — the creak of ice underfoot, the howl across a frozen tundra, the particular dread of drawing a land when you're one mana short in a Coldsnap draft. The Frost Cube is exactly that: a 577-card ice-themed environment pulling heavily from Kaldheim, with deliberate dips into Coldsnap and Ice Age for flavor and mechanical texture. It is currently a work in progress, but the skeleton already reveals a cube worth examining closely.

The Ten Guilds of Ice

The cube is organized around ten two-color archetypes, each with a distinct identity. The breadth here is impressive — Kaldheim's mechanical vocabulary is rich enough to support fundamentally different strategies across all ten color pairs.

Archetype in Focus — Boros Equipment

Of all the archetypes that materialized in the first drafts of this cube, none drew more concessions across the table than the Boros Equipment shell. On paper it reads as a straightforward Boast-and-attack strategy. In practice, two cards pushed it into a different category entirely: Sol Ring and Moonsilver Spear.

Card Spotlight — The Yeti of Ice Age

Card Spotlight — The Monstrous Raider

The Interaction — Wiitigo Enters the Battlefield

The most talked-about line in this cube involves these two cards sharing the battlefield at the same time. Wiitigo's counter placement happens as it enters the battlefield — a replacement effect applied during the resolution of the enter-the-battlefield event. Vorinclex's doubling ability is a replacement effect that modifies how many counters are placed on permanents you control.

Because both effects apply at the same time, the interaction resolves cleanly: Vorinclex sees that Wiitigo would enter with six counters and replaces that with twice as many. The Yeti that normally shambles in as a 6/6 instead arrives as a 12/12.

But the interaction doesn't stop at entering the battlefield. Wiitigo's upkeep trigger also feeds through Vorinclex's doubler. Each turn that Wiitigo blocks or is blocked, it would gain one counter — instead it gains two. And each turn it fails to see combat, it loses one counter — not two, because Vorinclex's halving clause only applies to opponents' counter placement. Your Wiitigo can only grow.

Card Spotlight — Marit Lage's Slumber

The Slumber rewards a specific style of play that this cube enables almost accidentally. Because the snow dual lands are all typed basic land subtypes (Mountain Plains, Island Swamp, and so on), every dual in your mana base counts toward the ten-permanent threshold. A two-color deck running eight snow duals plus two snow basics already has the Slumber active by the time it lands on an empty board. That's before any other snow permanents — creatures, artifacts, or enchantments — push the count higher.

Blue's Defensive Toolkit — Tappers & Glacial Slowness

One of the more interesting subthemes the cube surfaces is a suite of old-school blue control pieces that reward patience and positional play. The cube includes several cards from Ice Age and Kaldheim whose job is simply to slow the game down — freezing creatures, locking attackers, and buying the turns needed to assemble a win condition. Not all of them performed equally.

Glacial Slowness

Beyond the active tappers, the cube includes two Ice Age cards that represent a different flavor of defensive blue: walls and catastrophic land effects that prioritize survival over tempo.

The Mana Base — Kaldheim Snow Duals

One of the Frost Cube's most elegant structural decisions is its fixing package. Kaldheim shipped with a complete cycle of ten snow dual lands — one for each two-color pair — each typed as a Snow Land with two basic land subtypes. They enter tapped, which is the expected cost for fixing in a draft environment, but they count as two land types, produce snow mana, and work with any basic-land-matters effect in the cube.

The full Kaldheim snow dual cycle covers all ten guild pairs. Each land is a Snow Land with two basic subtypes, enters tapped, and taps for either of its two colors. Because the cube restricts basics to Snow-Covered Wastes only, these duals become the primary mana fixing available — making them substantially higher picks here than they would be in a typical draft. A player who secures three or four copies of their guild's dual in pack one is in excellent shape; a player who misses them often finds the mana base painful to operate.

Decks from the Table

Below are photographs of the actual decks that came out of the first Frost Cube session. Each build tells a different story about how the cube's archetypes play out in practice.

U W White-Blue Flyers & Evasion — Foretell and aerial pressure

R G U RGU Aggro & +1/+1 counters

U B G UBG Monsters — Ambition Outpacing the Mana

The UBG Monsters deck was the most ambitious build of the session. The drafter assembled an impressive collection of high-cost threats across three colors, supplemented by a light recursion subtheme — several cards that could pull creatures back from the graveyard or generate repeated value from the bin. On paper it looked like the kind of late-game inevitability that should dominate a slower pod.

In practice, the three-color mana base created too many awkward opening hands, and the absence of dedicated ramp meant the top-end monsters were consistently arriving one or two turns later than the game allowed. The Boros Equipment deck had already attacked twice with Moonsilver Spear by the time the first big threat resolved. The recursion subtheme provided genuine value in games that went long — pulling back a threat the opponent had just dealt with felt strong — but those long games were hard to reach when the early turns were spent on tapped snow duals.

U B UB Zombies — Snow and the Undead

The Dimir Zombies deck was exactly what the archetype description promises: snow, self-mill, and an army of the undead. The snow synergies ran cleanly through a mana base of Ice Tunnels and snow basics, keeping the Marit Lage's Slumber threshold comfortably in reach. Zombie tribal gave the deck a resilient combat presence — creatures that return from the graveyard or generate additional bodies on death are particularly punishing in a format without abundant sweepers.

What Makes This Cube Worth Drafting

The Frost Cube's most interesting design tension is the one between the snow basic restriction and the breadth of the archetype map. Being locked into Snow-Covered lands rewards players who stay two colors and draft their fixing intentionally, but the ten archetypes span every possible pair. This creates genuine draft decisions at every pick — do you take the powerful off-color card knowing your mana might not support it, or do you stay disciplined and trust that your archetype's payoffs will come?

Kaldheim as a base set is well-suited for cube construction. Foretell gives you a built-in resource-management mechanic that rewards slower decks without feeling parasitic. Boast rewards the Boros aggro deck for attacking, which it was already doing. The Giants and Wizards of Izzet give tribal critical mass to a color pair that usually gets spell-based synergies instead.

The Coldsnap and Ice Age inclusions — Wiitigo chief among them — add character that Kaldheim alone couldn't provide. These cards have rougher edges, less templating polish, and a different power curve, which makes them genuinely interesting in a drafting context. A Wiitigo is not the same kind of threat as a clean Kaldheim rare, and that asymmetry rewards players who understand the older cards.