I believe cards you cast from your hand enter the battlefield from the stack. All except lands, so the card should have a nonland clause in there. Cards that say "from your hand onto the battlefield" are the ones meant to be affected.
I wonder if a good way to acheive your goal wouldn't be to simply remove the cards that can dominate a game by themselves, or warp games around the one card. J,tMS, Swords of X & Y, Recurring Nightmare, Rancor, Armageddon . . . etc. Doing this may level the playing field to a more balanced degree and encourage players to look for interactions rather than specific cards -> Meloku the Clouded Mirror + Shelldock Isle.
With only 4 people, going to down to 360 seems like a fine call. When I was still using my unpowered cube, that was our group size and 360 was perfect for us. It's a tight list, but the overall deck quality was exactly where we wanted it. The most significant pro to having a smaller list is that the difference between your strongest cards and your weakest cards is smaller than in larger lists. Larger lists can mitigate this by replacing the weaker cards with archetype support cards that may not be as generally strong as the rest of your list, but are powerful contenders when in the right deck. This is the most significant con I found having a small play group (note: it's not so much the size of the list as it is the size of the playgroup simply due to the portion of the cube you see in a draft). The number of niche archetypes you can support is also smaller. Think 0-1 in each color. For example, I had a hard time running the Pox prison package for very long in my list because I also wanted to support reanimator/recurring nightmare/gy utility archetype. With only one player strong in black, out of 4 at the draft, he may be forced into pox prison because those are the available cards, when he originally was going for a basic dimir control deck. That wasn't what I wanted out of my cube. This had me cutting my niche archetypes down a bit to allow more flexibility in draft. The good news, is that you can regularly swap out which archetypes you support at any given draft. Kiki-Jiki combo can be in one draft, and Wildfire in the next. Blink in one, and tokens in the next. Having a smaller cube makes it more likely you will see these come together as well.
That's tough. I couldn't see cutting any of the swords, but if I had to it'd probably be Body and Mind. Fire and Ice fit's nicely in in any deck providing a source of board control and card advantage. Feast and Famine is best in control providing an opportunity to advance your board state, stabilize, and maintain control all at once. Light and Shadow, while inconsistent, has sweet build around potential for midrange. War and Peace is loved by aggro decks world wide. Body and Mind however, is just generally good like Fire and Ice but in a less interesting way. Since it doesn't push me in a direction, or get me excited if I'm already there, and the other sword with those same attributes is more interesting, I'd probably cut the "lesser" redundant sword.
Overthrown Bastion Land t: Add G or W to your mana pool. Target creature an opponent controls gets +1/+1 until the beginning of your next turn.
(could be a cycle)
Bleeding Landscape Land t, Reveal two cards from your hand that share a color: Add one mana to your mana pool of the revealed cards' shared color.
Mana Ossuary Land t: Add 1 to your mana pool. t: Choose a card in your graveyard: Add one mana to your mana pool of any of the chosen card's colors.
Shifting Burnyards Land t: Add 1 to your mana pool. t: Add B or R to your mana pool, then sacrifice Shifting Burnyards. If you do, search your library for a basic swamp or basic mountain and put it onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle your library.
(could also be a cycle)
The atmosphere at the other forum, whatever it is, is secondary to point of this thread. It should only be discussed here in reference to the primary point of this thread, which is the reception of divergent ideas in the MTGS cube community. I say that because doing anything else will lead down a path better left alone.
I think Antknee is right, some honest self-reflection is what is called for here. It's one thing to say that differing philosophies are able to carve out their own space to be developed here on these boards. It's another thing entirely to say that we actively help to cultivate a space for these ideas to develop. Allowing the former is not the same as doing the latter. Also, how often in our dicussion are we more focused on being right and proving our points, than we are in giving consideration to where different ideas might fit? The two are not mutually exclusive, but the more of one you focus on the less room there is for the other. I'd rather my own behavior were more in line with cultivation and consideration, but my own self-reflection informs me that I have occassionally fallen short of that ideal.
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/card-and-archetype-discussion/193777-the-multiplayer-edh-cube-thread
My 2 cents.
Overthrown Bastion
Land
t: Add G or W to your mana pool. Target creature an opponent controls gets +1/+1 until the beginning of your next turn.
(could be a cycle)
Bleeding Landscape
Land
t, Reveal two cards from your hand that share a color: Add one mana to your mana pool of the revealed cards' shared color.
Mana Ossuary
Land
t: Add 1 to your mana pool.
t: Choose a card in your graveyard: Add one mana to your mana pool of any of the chosen card's colors.
Shifting Burnyards
Land
t: Add 1 to your mana pool.
t: Add B or R to your mana pool, then sacrifice Shifting Burnyards. If you do, search your library for a basic swamp or basic mountain and put it onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle your library.
(could also be a cycle)
I think Antknee is right, some honest self-reflection is what is called for here. It's one thing to say that differing philosophies are able to carve out their own space to be developed here on these boards. It's another thing entirely to say that we actively help to cultivate a space for these ideas to develop. Allowing the former is not the same as doing the latter. Also, how often in our dicussion are we more focused on being right and proving our points, than we are in giving consideration to where different ideas might fit? The two are not mutually exclusive, but the more of one you focus on the less room there is for the other. I'd rather my own behavior were more in line with cultivation and consideration, but my own self-reflection informs me that I have occassionally fallen short of that ideal.