This guest post is written by Eric Klug. For those wishing to contribute to cubedrafting.com, contact eerwin at gmail dot com.

By Eric Klug

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Eric. I started playing Magic during Saga block and have never stopped. I play at a semi-competitive level. Recently I made it to my first Pro Tour in Kyoto. I live in Maryland but I’m originally from Cincinnati, Ohio…

White Cards

If you’ve never been to Ohio you may not be aware of two things:

1. There’s not much to do beyond the typical, go to the movies, eat greasy food.

2. A lot of Magic gets played (1. being a contributing factor).

One of the many stores I’ve played while I was living there was called Hobbytown and players went there every Wednesday night and Saturday morning to draft. Weird times, right? Not long after I found out about it I met a guy there named Tom Lapille. One day Tom hands me a list of cards asking, “Do you have any of these?” One of the cards that I remember was AWOL. Tom was known for being almost exclusively a constructed player so it struck me as pretty odd that he was looking for an AWOL. “What is this for?” I asked.

“I’m building a Cube.”

Blue Cards

“Oh, I’ve heard of something like that.” I replied. And we went on to talk about the format and trade some cards. A few weeks later Tom introduced me to Winston drafts with his cube and very shortly we were having 6-mans at Hobbytown or over at Tom’s.

I really enjoyed playing cube for several reasons. Limited is my favorite format. I love the creativity of deck building on the fly. I love that there’s only a single copy of cards you’d auto-4-of in most constructed formats. It seems crazy to me now that I didn’t immediately begin trying to build my own.

Black Cards

It wasn’t until I was back visiting Ohio from college that I met up with Tom again and relived the cube. He had put a lot more work into it since at it was more fun than ever. So one night I started pulling cards from my collection. At first I just started pulling every awesome card I owned. Seemed simple enough. But as I delved further I realized that, at least to start, I wasn’t going to have all the cards I wanted to build my cube. And it was going to take quite a bit of time and money to acquire everything. This was problematic for me because one, I’m a little obsessive compulsive; I didn’t want to play a single game of my cube if cards were missing. And two, I’m pretty impatient. The solution came quickly. All the missing cards were mostly rare. Surely a no-rare cube would be just as fun.

Red Cards

So I set out building. I invited a few guys over my house that week including Ben Weinberg and Tom to test out my common/uncommon cube. It turned out great and we were able to identify a few mistakes from the start. It seemed like certain X spells were just too powerful for this sort of cube. Fireball would wreck games where you were clearly going to win and your opponent top decked it to burn you out. Let alone, Mind Twist. I’m not sure what I was thinking including that card. Blue was going to need some work. Since the majority of this cube is combat based, blue needed to be capable of handling the initial onslaught. It needed some earlier counterspells and a few more efficient creatures, hopefully some fatties too. I was happy nonetheless.

Green Cards

Over the next few months I combed Gather and received suggestions from those I played with. I pulled most of the commons and uncommons Tom was running in his cube. I was surprised and excited by each card I either didn’t know was a common/uncommon or had never seen before: Psionic Blast, Maze of Ith, Predatory Nightstalker, Hypnotic Specter, Serra Angel, Miraculous Recovery, Binding Grasp, etc; Soon my cube seemed really powerful for containing no rares.

If my memory serves my cube is almost two years old, and now looks like this.

Gold Cards

One thing I haven’t been able to adequately put into words until recently is the difference between playing a powered cube and common/uncommon cube. It is obvious to say that the games are much more weighted in combat and removal in this cube but that doesn’t say everything. The major difference lies in the fact that commons and uncommons are the brick and mortar of actual limited play. In that, I often feel a more powerful cube tends to emulate constructed (albeit some weird constructed).

Artifacts

Common/uncommon cube operates a little differently. I’ll give anyone who hasn’t cubed an instant visual - imagine you’re playing Shards booster draft and you open this pack:

Resounding Thunder
Branching Bolt
Oblivion Ring
Executioner’s Capsule
Blightning
Sanctum Gargoyle
Wild Nacatyl
Tidehollow Strix
Vithian Stinger

Lands

Esper Panorama
Necrogenesis
Bull Ceredon
Tower Gargoyle
(Rare Excluded)

Add the remaining expansions and you’re pretty close to common/uncommon cubing.

Special thanks to Eric for submitting this article. Remember you can submit your own cube articles by contacting me via eerwin (at) gmail (dot) com.