If the number of queues firing is any indicator, the Holiday Cube has been an enormous success for Wizards with one of the highest take-up rates of the past year (the bonus Phantom Tickets probably dont hurt either). For Cube enthusiasts, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that despite the addition of Power, mono-red and mono-white are still the best decks in Cube with win rate of over 59%! The good news is that they are considerably less played than in the Legacy Cube, so you're less likely to be caught by the fun police. With a win % of almost 60%, this is basically as close to broken as a modern format gets and since Wizaards is likely looking at the same numbers I am, I expect substantial changes to these archetypes in the next iteration of the Cube.

I blame LSV for the poor showing of other archetypes in the Cube. Just as LSV was responsible for ruining previous Cubes for everyone by popularizing the red menace, he made Combo/Storm look so easy and so much fun on stream that everyone wanted to do it. And like 5-colour in Khans of Tarkir and Spider Spawning in Innistrad, it became one of the strongest and most fun things to do in draft. A good Combo/Storm deck became more and more difficult to build, but that did not stop people trying to force it. The problem that these niche archetypes have is their fragility and they do not tolerate multiple drafters at the table.

Drafting mono-red is a much simpler proposition than combo with strong results.

On the next tier down we once again see the same archetype from Legacy Cube dominating: UR. UR gets access to all of the best combos: Through the Breach, Tinker and possibly the most consistent of all, Splinter Twin as well as the most broken individual cards.

When looking at the success of a combo, you want to look at the win % of the enablers rather than the finisher. Unsurprisingly, Splinter Twin itself has a win % of 81% and Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker with 72, % but it's the setup cards like Pestermite with a win % of 62% and Deceiver Exarch at 61% that are likely the true indicators of the combo's strength.

The numbers also seem to support the general consensus that Time Vault is the best single card in the cube with a win % of 68.5% on its own. The only other real contenders are Ravages of War and Armageddon, which of course are conditional. I expect these are the key to mono-white's win %. No-one else wants them and they are simply devastating to all those durdle decks in combination with any sort of board presence. Cutting just one of these from the Cube may be enough to pull back on white, where red needs much more substantial remediation.

As a shock to no-one, blue is grossly overdrafted with a whopping 60% of players choosing to include it in their decks. Green once again takes the biggest hit in the powered cube with it's glory not only stolen, but arguably done better by the mana rocks. Green needs to find a new place in this Cube and the numbers show it's likely to be in the more broken direction: Tooth and Nail, Natural Order, Channel etc. It's hard because the green Vintage and Legacy decks are either impractical to include (Elves, Infect) or green is relegated to a support color. Maybe this is the direction it should take; a Maverick-esque deck with the odd broken combo? Alternatively the tokens/overrun plan worked pretty well in MMA and it wouldnt take too much to make Overrun/Tromp a combo finisher along with Craterhoof Behemoth.

Overall I've enjoyed Holiday Cube more than the Legacy Cube, mostly because it just feels more like a Cube should. If Wizards wants to keep Cube a balanced format in the long term, I think it still has some way to go in addressing imbalances in both individual card choices and archetypes.