Cube design: Cantrip/Scry

On the topic of "cube design for better play experience" I wanted to explore a few common strategies for reducing mana screw frequency. Strategies I've seen recommended:

• Make sure there are attractive lands and fixing to draft.
• Lower the curve in the cube. Lower curve decks function better on 2-3 lands. An effective strategy, but has a big impact on play style and might not be compatible with the rest of the cubes goals.
• Make sure there is good density of attractive cantrips and scry effects at lower mana values.

All of these are probably good but I wanted to do some tests to verify how effective option 3 is.

Tests are done using this script. It's a basic simulation that plays a 40 card deck with 17 lands and tries to play a land every turn. There is no mulligan but starting hands with less than 2 or more than 5 lands are ignored.

The simulation plays 5 rounds and defines mana screw as missing more than 1 land drop during that time. 1 missed land is fine but if you miss 2 (or more) in the first five turns you are probably having a bad time.

The simulation will also play cantrips and scry if it has them available, but only one per turn. Mana cost is not taken into account and scry always digs for lands. Not a perfect simulation but it gives us some baseline numbers we can compare! If we run a million games we get:

Pretty decent, cheap draw definitely makes a difference and getting 3 playable 1-3 mana cantrips is not impossible if the cube offers them up at a decent rate. Now how about scry:

Scry:1 is not as good as drawing obviously but still pretty decent. Scry:2 is actually slightly better at finding a land drop in time than draw 1.

Here's a deck that manages to pick up 2 cheap cantrips, two Scry:1 effects and one Scry:2. Not totally unrealistic if the cube pushes those effects. In return it has more than halved it's chance of getting screwed.

The big challenge is finding cheap, playable cantrips that are also interesting to play (in non-blue colors). Drawing cards is a powerful effect, but doesn't have a lot of synergies, and is low tempo. Something like [[Spirited Companion]] is playable in many decks but doesn't really do anything. Would love to hear what 1-3 mana cantrips people like for cube.

Scry/Surveil is a lot cheaper of an effect so can be found on more interesting cards. [[Faerie Seer]] is a slam dunk, [[Play with Fire]] is a good choice in some environments.

Other effects to look at:

Investigate: Same as draw but more flexible and on better tempo cards.

Explore: Almost a draw when it comes to land fishing. Comes on a lot of playable stuff and can even be decent tempo. Will try adding this to the script as well.

Cycling: Should have exactly the same effect as draw, but even worse tempo than a cantrip. The flexibility is a huge upside of course.

Looting: Also basically draw and can be had for much better tempo.