I Love You's thoughts about MTGO Cube

So after playing a lot of the current MTGO Cube, I wanted to post my collected thoughts and see how other people feel overall. I've played enough to have worked pretty much every archtype, both forcing them and sliding into them naturally, and having a lot of experience with Cube in general I think I've got a good handle on things at this stage.

This is by far the worst cube I have ever played. This includes home-made cubes, power cubes, unpowered cubes, etc. While some of my initial impressions were somewhat off (the viability of blue being a major overestimation, as well as the role of PWs), the overall pro consensus, as well as my own experiences and those of goons I've talked to, point at a very specific power imbalance.

There are, it seems, exactly two viable archtypes in the current cube. These are:
1. Red Deck Wins (Boros splash is fine as well)
2. Splinter Twin combo

Black/White aggro seems to be a very, very distant 3rd, maybe?

Stats from MTGO seem to support this analysis. RDW has an extremely high win percentage, is trivial to draft, supports multiple players in the same pool running essentially the same deck, has several nearly unanswerable cards that come down on turn 2 or 3, and makes most of the midrangey goodstuff decks this cube is trying to support completely, utterly unplayable. It also has the least variance of any of the possible archtypes, which in a cube overloaded with Multicolored cards and midrangey builds is even more powerful and will steal wins even against decks designed to counter RDW.

The reason Twin is the only other really successful arctype is because it is the only narrow-but-powerful built-in win condition that wasn't removed from the cube for the sake of "parity". Nothing else in the cube really fast or powerful enough to compete, barring a few specific and overpowered cards such as Vedalken Shackles and Umezawa's Jitte, and even then the removal of the Swords has made it far less likely you will have one of these one-out options for beating RDW.

Twin works fine because it plays like a typical survival/value deck (which everyone who isn't RDW is trying to play anyway) that can also win completely out of nowhere - a hallmark of most good decks from past cubes. And since other decks no longer can snag a few "narrow" winning cards or packages into their decks with any frequency, they are forced to try to play a value game against RDW and Twin - a losing proposition if there ever was one, since these decks operate on a totally different axis.

The fact of the matter is that there really is no point in NOT forcing RDW, while possibly snagging blue and hoping to grab a Twin package in the meantime. Red is splashy, strong with blue, unbelievably powerful in a vacuum, and almost every card is effectively replaceable with another red card even if red is getting cut. You can always go two-color (red duals are extremely easy to pick up) if you are cut too hard at almost no penalty, and you don't automatically lose to other Red decks the way most midrange builds do.

Forcing red every draft has shown to have amazing results (mostly 3-0s with a handful of 2-1s) and doesn't seem to be getting any worse even as people try to draft specifically to beat it. Likewise, shifting draft strategies to beat RDW just isn't cutting it - there's just not enough fast lifegain and utility to consistently stop a deck that curves perfectly every game and has tons of reach to boot.