So here’s my first post on one of my favorite hobbies: cube design.

I like to design different cubes for pure entertainment, although I rarely build them after designing them because the fun of the exercise was in the design. Plus, it’s a lot of work to put physical cubes together! Among the ones I’ve designed in the past are an all-creature cube, a Spirit-themed cube (think Kamigawa plus other interactions/Spirits throughout Magic), and a mono-blue cube (with artifacts of course).

Designing cubes with concrete goals about the games and strategies players can create is very interesting and difficult, often very similar to designing a completely different game from conventional Magic. I’d really wanted to explore some directions that vastly changed the power level of cards after my work with the Spirit cube, and decided my next project would be an all one-drops cube. I wanted it to be small, a cube designed for 2-4 players at most and really only built for Winston/Solomon drafting, two of my favorite formats to play idly.

The idea of a cube where Sol Ring isn’t even good was very alluring, and the idea of making cards like Flame Jab and Scythe Tiger awesome was really attractive to me. I built the cube once on my way to the Memphis Open, to get a feel for the ideas, and trimmed it down to about 270 cards: 90 cards too many. I decided to let it sit for a few weeks, and then come back at it. That’s what I did yesterday!

One odd rule I set myself was “no X spells,” because I didn’t want all the games to be about Fireball and Feral Hydra while so many other strategies got overshadowed, and because those cards don’t feel like one-drops. I decided kicker was fine, as all of those cards were actually built to be cast for one mana enough of the time. Although a little cheating, it makes Sol Ring and such stronger, and I wanted to justify including them while not breaking them.

Here’s the list:

Black

Creatures
1 Carnophage
1 Carrion Feeder
1 Circling Vultures
1 Death’s Shadow
1 Duskwalker
1 Entrails Feaster
1 Festering Goblin
1 Fume Spitter
1 Guul Draz Assassin
1 Guul Draz Vampire
1 Plagued Rusalka
1 Quag Vampires
1 Shadow Guildmage
1 Slithering Shade
1 Vampire Lacerator
1 Zulaport Enforcer

Pseudo-dudes
1 Genju of the Fens
1 Quest for the Gravelord
1 Sarcomancy

Removal
1 Bone Splinters
1 Darkblast
1 Deathmark
1 Disfigure
1 Executioner’s Capsule
1 Ghastly Demise
1 Midnight Charm
1 Vendetta

Card Manipulation
1 Bloodchief Ascension
1 Phyrexian Reclamation
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Reanimate
1 Unearth

You might notice the absence of some cards that seem good, like Inquisition of Kozilek, Duress, etc. These cards are deceptively weak in a format where everyone can dump their hands quickly. In fact, black is one of the strongest colors in the cube thanks to its strong creatures and awesome removal, but it is limited by an intense vulnerability to both artifacts and Genjus.

Blue

Creatures
1 Drifter il-Dal
1 Enclave Cryptologist
1 Faerie Squadron
1 Kraken Hatchling
1 Skywatcher Adept

Pseudo-dudes
1 Genju of the Falls
1 Wind Zendikon

Removal
1 Blue Elemental Blast
1 Hydroblast
1 Mark of Eviction
1 Mind Harness
1 Pongify
1 Psychic Purge
1 Seal of Removal
1 Unsummon

Card Manipulation
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
1 Curiosity
1 Preordain
1 Shared Discovery
1 Dizzy Spell
1 Mystical Tutor

Counterspells
1 Annul
1 Dispel
1 Disrupt
1 Divert
1 Force Spike
1 Mental Misstep
1 Spell Pierce
1 Turn Aside

I’m kind of worried about blue. It’s definitely only a support color, but it offers one of the best cards in the format—Ancestral Recall—and some of the strongest solutions to the Genjus. As my gut tells me that the Genjus are really strong, blue is more attractive as a result if I’m right. I also gave blue the color hosers but didn’t give them to red, because being able to attack red that way increases blue’s power level, while red doesn’t need to be picking on the crippled color.

White

Creatures
1 Akrasan Squire
1 Auriok Glaivemaster
1 Caravan Escort
1 Cenn’s Tactician
1 Devoted Caretaker
1 Elite Vanguard
1 Goldmeadow Harrier
1 Icatian Javelineers
1 Icatian Priest
1 Infantry Veteran
1 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
1 Kitesail Apprentice
1 Mother of Runes
1 Mystic Penitent
1 Order of the Stars
1 Savannah Lions
1 Student of Warfare
1 Weathered Wayfarer

Pseudo-dudes
1 Genju of the Fields
1 Hyena Umbra

Removal
1 Condemn
1 Dispeller’s Capsule
1 Harm’s Way
1 Kirtar’s Desire
1 Mana Tithe
1 Path to Exile
1 Sunlance
1 Swords to Plowshares

Card Manipulation
1 Argivian Find
1 Enlightened Tutor
1 Land Tax
1 Steelshaper’s Gift

White has a definite “equipment matters” theme but also offers you the ability to kill basically anything. It’s great as a beatdown and control color. I thought about just running ten more white cards than every other color and making it a color multiple players had to fight over, but didn’t like how that dynamic would play in Winston draft.

Green

Creatures
1 Birds of Paradise
1 Elvish Lyrist
1 Elvish Scrapper
1 Fyndhorn Elves
1 Granger Guildmage
1 Joraga Warcaller
1 Jungle Lion
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Llanowar Mentor
1 Mtenda Lion
1 Mwonvuli Ooze
1 Nettle Sentinel
1 Nimble Mongoose
1 Noble Hierarch
1 Pouncing Jaguar
1 Quirion Ranger
1 Rogue Elephant
1 Scavenger Folk
1 Scute Mob
1 Scythe Tiger
1 Skarrgan Pit-Skulk

Pseudo-creatures
1 Genju of the Cedars
1 Rancor

Removal
1 Crumble
1 Hornet Sting
1 Nature’s Claim
1 Oxidize

Card Manipulation
1 Glimpse of Nature
1 Noxious Revival
1 Sylvan Tutor
1 Utopia Sprawl
1 Worldly Tutor

I like green. Robust creatures, a little mana-fixing, and a healthy amount of artifact destruction mean that green decks are going to be pretty playable. It was the easiest color to design, because I knew exactly what I wanted. You’ll note I didn’t include pump spells—I don’t think that creature trading is going to be very good in the format, and green’s creatures are already pretty solid. Most games will come down to jockeying for board advantage against opposing removal and equipment, which pump spells won’t really assist. I may be wrong, at which point we’ll revisit the issue starting with Mutagenic Growth.

Red

Creatures
1 Bloodfire Dwarf
1 Bloodhall Ooze
1 Dragonmaster Outcast
1 Frostling
1 Goblin Guide
1 Goblin Patrol
1 Gorilla Shaman
1 Grim Lavamancer
1 Kris Mage
1 Magus of the Scroll
1 Martyr of Ashes
1 Mogg Fanatic
1 Skitter of Lizards
1 Spikeshot Elder

Pseudo-dudes
1 Devastating Summons
1 Genju of the Spires

Removal
1 Crush
1 Overload
1 Burst Lightning
1 Chain Lightning
1 Death Spark
1 Firestorm
1 Flame Jab
1 Forked Bolt
1 Lava Dart
1 Lightning Bolt
1 Seal of Fire
1 Searing Touch
1 Shard Volley

Card Manipulation
1 Gamble

Red’s definitely got the best removal, but it’s not amazing at attacking and has no strong card manipulation available, relying on advantages gained by Death Spark, pingers, and the like. Firestorm is certainly one of the biggest bombs in the format however, and red is both really good and very dangerous. Green is likely to be the color that plays best against red, although black may have that honor thanks to Death’s Shadow and the ability to keep it around, not to mention the nigh-unbeatable Bloodchief Ascension.

Artifacts

Removal
1 Blazing Torch
1 Brittle Effigy
1 Cursed Scroll
1 Leonin Bola
1 Pithing Needle
1 Pyrite Spellbomb
1 Shuriken
1 Viridian Longbow

Mana
1 Horizon Spellbomb
1 Mana Vault
1 Sol Ring
1 Springleaf Drum
1 Wanderer’s Twig
1 Wayfarer’s Bauble

Enhancement
1 Basilisk Collar
1 Bonesplitter
1 Flayer Husk
1 Trusty Machete

Card Manipulation
1 Sensei’s Divining Top
1 Skullclamp

These are just all awesome cards, although their value has changed from previous formats. The decks reliant on equipment and kicker creatures will consider Sol Ring and Mana Vault, while other decks will consider them unplayable. The Vault may wind up being bad enough to cut entirely, which will probably lead to Sylvok Lifestaff making it in. The fixers give players the option of splashing in powerful cards, although time will tell how viable fixing actually is in the format given the low land counts I expect most decks to run. Skullclamp and Cursed Scroll are certainly two of the very best cards in the format, but all of these are reasonable.

Gold

1 Figure of Destiny
1 Oona’s Gatewarden
1 Tattermunge Maniac
1 Wax/Wane

There wasn’t a playable U/W hybrid, and the R/B ones were all basically worse versions of existing black and red cards, so I choose to eschew them and just do the R/W instead. These are pretty basic choices, with Figure one of the best creatures and Wax/Wane one of the more versatile spells against the Genju.

I’ll hopefully be building this over the next few weeks, and I’d like to find some time to play with it leading up to and at the Invitational. I’m going to be working on an all-old face cube and an all-new face cube in the near future, but I’d love to hear any quirky ideas for cubes or see others that you guys have worked on. I know Alex Bertoncini has a fun combo cube and a tribal cube, and lots of players have built peasant cubes that are really gas.

Feel free to post here or tweet them to me, @SecludedGlenn on Twitter.

- Glenn Jones

As soon as I heard about cube drafting, I knew it was for me. Many eons ago, in high school, my friends and I would create faux booster packs out of spare cards to do four-person drafts on the cheap. This turned out to be reliably fun enough, even with essentially chaff cards bereft of anything usable for any other format, that over the intervening years I’ve usually had a box of cards slowly refined for this purpose. Lately, that box has become a fully intentional cube, but not a traditional best-cards-ever version.

Instead, my cube has a vision inspired by my favorite block ever, Time Spiral, and my favorite draft environment ever, Magic 2011. You can view my continuously-updated, complete cube spreadsheet here, including a tab of cards that I’ve rotated since inaugurating the list.

Although it’s now considered a failed experiment in Magic set design, Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight felt like a love letter to me from Wizards R&D. I’ve been playing for the majority of my lifespan, and I got nearly all of the references. If the block hadn’t had a word of reminder text, I would hardly have noticed until Future Sight introduced so many keywords that even reading the mothership previews couldn’t unveil them all. I bought boxes and boxes of this block, which I’ve never done before or since.

That said, I know why R&D will never do something like that again: mechanically, those sets were a mess, and can’t possibly be attractive to new players. If the GDS2 has one theme, it’s that every new set aims to be just about the opposite of Time Spiral: simpler, mechanically tied together, and not just a laundry list of in-jokes for old-timers. I respect that, and think R&D is right to fight complexity creep as a top priority.

My favorite official booster draft format to date is Magic 2011, even ahead of triple-Onslaught or Ravnica/Guildpact/Dissension. That’s what sold me on the fun of simple cards. The few times I did different Time Spiral-block drafts, no matter how much I love the sets, it did not provide me as much fun as M11 did this summer. R&D really “got religion” on complexity after Time Spiral, but it only appeared fully in Shards block due to the long lead times on Magic sets.

My solution to loving Time Spiral but agreeing with the fun of simplicity was to set a different target for my cube. I want to create the perfect draft set for players like me, who’ve been around a long time and know all the mechanics, but taking into account that brain-melting board situations are not fun—at least not often. Just as important, I want cards that are off the beaten path, which is part of why I avoid the best-cards-ever plan. Even the common/uncommon cubes I’ve seen go too readily toward famous power spells like Swords to Plowshares. So, while I have classics like Man-o’-War, I’m just as excited to run Immolation.

I won’t deny that my Johnny side encourages this; generally, the more people are doing something one way, the less I want to do the same thing. I’m also kind of burned out on “that play was so broken!” from years of being interested in and writing about Type One. When I want to see insane things happen, the warm embrace of EDH is there to sate my desires. And when I want to see even crazier things, I have a Type Four stack. The cube is for a different type of joy.

Structure

My cube is 360 cards, designed to be perfect for an eight-person table to booster draft 15-card packs. I haven’t gone bigger yet because of key constraints like finding usable red cards. To make it easy, I have 50-card sections for each color and 110 slots for land, artifact, colorless, hybrid, and multicolor. The idea behind treating those together is to avoid rigidity. I want to have the flexibility to play up either multicolor or artifact themes really easily. One rotation I specifically swapped about 30 multicolor cards for an equal number of artifacts. I don’t keep the multicolor parts rigidly equal because (a) that would be a pain and (b) I’ve always thought certain colors should have an easier time working together, like W/G and B/R, so I don’t mind if some favoritism inadvertently appears.

Early Mistakes

The downside of running a totally different cube from the rest of the internet is limited opportunities to benefit from conventional wisdom, so I’ve made plenty of mistakes in designing the cube with each iteration. At the time I started work in earnest, I had never read Tom LaPille’s cube articles, among others that might’ve made the start less rough even for my unusual goal.

At first, the problem was with the poor screening on card selection. I wanted cards that would have been bombs in a more mundane draft format, or at least would have been considered strong playables. The problem with this is that bomby cards are often four or more mana, so the first time I did an eight-man with it, everyone’s mana curve was horrible. Indeed, I 0-4′d my own cube with a W/U flying deck that had entirely too many four- and five-drops. I solved this by laying all the cards in each section of the pool on a table sorted by converted mana cost, and rotating 20% of the cards out, replacing each one with a card that was at least one mana cheaper. Even that ended up creating a glut at three mana, which I had to iron out with subsequent changes. At this point I get the most excited when I discover a one-drop that I genuinely want to run.

The next mistake was to allow way too much removal. If an ordinary set’s Limited removal is at maybe a 5 or 6 out of 10, my cube was running roughly an 11. I had Cone of Flame, Shower of Coals, Arc Lightning, Jagged Lightning, Magma Burst, Reckless Spite, Strangling Soot, Infest, Pyroclasm… you get the idea. Armadillo Cloak was, no joke, a 15th pick one time because creatures wouldn’t live long enough to use it, if they even survived long enough for it to resolve. I’ve made two substantial waves of reduction in the removal since then.

After those major issues, the changes have gotten more subtle. For instance, as a consequence of dialing down the removal, blue became a lot better, since I hadn’t done anything to the bounce. Out of 50 blue cards, I was running Wash Out, Rushing River, Man-o’-War, Repulse, Venser’s Diffusion, Echo Tracer, Churning Eddy, and Tradewind Rider. The problem revealed itself when a friend and I played 75-card Sealed pools of the cube, and he got about five of those bounce cards. It was as if my side of the table were coated in Teflon; nothing could stick. Looter il-Kor is a great win condition under those circumstances.

The latest discovery was that I have too much flying, meaning U/W mirror matches can be insanely painful. I’m looking to reduce flying, and add in some creatures with landwalk abilities to compensate. (I already have two horsemanship cards, several shadow, and straight-up unblockables.) Keeping the ground important to every color is important for interactive play, and I’ve prioritized adding stalemate-breakers like Thundermare to help end games that would stall out.

Ocular Delight

One of my other goals is that my cube should be absolutely gorgeous, a treat for the eyes. I’ve started pursuing altered art, promo cards like Electrolyze and Liliana’s Specter, and the best-looking version of each card. I don’t like foils as a general rule, so I mostly include them if it’s my only copy of a card, or I’m trying to mitigate the worst-ever look of artifacts in the original Mirrodin. My biggest problem is that the new card frame is so ugly. You can tell I’m an old fogey from the fact that I’m still calling it new after over seven years.

Permit me a moment on my soap box: I think the #1 biggest problem with modern R&D is the card frame’s ugliness. The boxes are here forever, and I think they’re a net positive. I just want one change from Wizards: make the cards broadcast their colors, like they used to. An example: Smash, Apocalypse vs. Ravnica; the newer one looks like WotC ran out of ink. I want the borders to be more solid, and the background of all the boxes to be tinted if not straight-up colorized.

I know Wizards can do it, because Planar Chaos tantalized us with its beauty. Just use the PC-timeshifted frames but with black text on blue and white cards’ names and types. Look at Pyrohemia and Damnation; they’re so cool! I often cite Pyrohemia as a visually perfect card. The PC-timeshifted frame is so gorgeous that I don’t even want to replace my Blood Knight with the extended-art version. The fact that they haven’t fixed this makes me curious if their market research shows that less-colorful cards are easier for new players, although, unlike the frame boxes, I can’t think of any reason why that would be true.

As a result of this very, very strong preference, the average age of the cards in my cube is radically high. I do run new-frame cards, because many of them are so fun to play, but it hurts to look at them. When I’m rotating cards, I find myself deliberately holding down the proportion of bad frames. I have a spreadsheet of the cube contents, with a column titled “Aesthetics”; a PivotTable count reveals that only 98 of 360 cards are on the new frame without mitigating characteristics like being textless, PC- or FS-timeshift, or Esper. I’m actually driving that down bit by bit on each rotation, and targeting my altered-art commission budget at newer cards to “fix” them into something attractive.

Simplicity

Another factor that I control tightly in my cube is complexity. Since, of course, featuring set mechanics from a dozen blocks will create a lot of extra complexity, I wanted to create a metric to monitor and control it. I planned to rate on a 1-10 scale, but eventually settled at 1-7—even the scale measuring simplicity wants to be simple. So far, I haven’t had to use 7, which I envision assigning only to nightmarish cards like Humility or Opalescence. Here’s roughly how I graded cards, with examples from the cube’s current or recently rotated contents:

1 = Vanilla (Nessian Courser), french vanilla (Azure Drake), simple virtual vanilla (Cloudchaser Eagle), or straightforward spells (Annihilate)

2 = Requires some understanding of timing rules, like activated and triggered abilities (Tar Pit Warrior, Power of Fire), or expands options, like library searching (Rampant Growth), or uses additional/reduced casting costs (Spontaneous Combustion, Fireblast)

3 = Almost any set mechanic (Benalish Lancer, Ethercaste Knight, Deep Analysis, Shriekmaw), anything that refers to upkeep (Serendib Efreet, Blastoderm), or has minor memory issues (Coldsteel Heart), trample (Cradle Guard), deathtouch (Thornweald Archer), mentioning converted mana cost (Smother)

4 = Anything really texty like suspend (Errant Ephemeron), regeneration (River Boa), interactions between keyword mechanics (Viscera Dragger, Ichor Slick), protection (Blood Knight), X spells (Verdeloth the Ancient)

5 = Highly specialized rules, like Morph (Whipcorder), weird effects that introduce a lot of thinking (Lashknife Barrier) or grant non-evergreen abilities all over the place (Sporoloth Ancient)

6 = Planeswalkers (Chandra Ablaze), magnifying other complex stuff (Ixidron), changing the rules majorly (Undying Flames), changing card types (Mishra’s Factory, Weatherseed Totem), turn structure alteration (Relentless Assault)

7 = Judge Kryptonite — I won’t put these cards in the cube, but it would be Opalescence, Humility, Licids, Lich, prolific copying and layer interaction, etc.

This accounts for most things, but I won’t claim it’s 100% consistent. Sometimes the confluence of two things that would separately be 3′s pushes a card to 4. You, the veteran Magic player, might think it’s silly to put trample and regeneration at 3 and 4, but it was only a year ago that I finally could remember regenerating tapped the creature. The current average rating of my cube is a 2.3.

The only way for me to determine whether this is actually a good number is to compare it to real sets. I figured that, rather than try to weight it by rarity, I could create a more valid comparison to my cube by evaluating sets as if for a rotisserie draft (one copy of each card). The over-representation of rares would reflect a similar dynamic to my cube, which isn’t designed to be as friendly to new players as a modern expansion set is.

On this scale, M11 averages 2.07, Zendikar is 2.24, Invasion is 2.27, and Future Sight is 3.2. I consider this “mission accomplished”, as the complexity region right above Zendikar and Invasion is a comfortable one for experienced players. If I cut all Morph cards, it’d drop like a rock. This metric is something I intend to continue watching closely.

After re-reading Aaron Forsythe’s GDS2 note on common word count—“For recent comparison, Shards of Alara had just over seventeen words per common, Zendikar just under twenty, and Scars of Mirrodin just under seventeen (Magic 2011 had about twelve and a half, and that’s including reminder text).”—I decided that this would also be a great metric, and, after rotating a few word-bombs like Search for Tomorrow (64!), the cube is 19.5 words per card.

If the counts Aaron references include type lines, mine is off by roughly two words per card—still within striking distance. My numbers are even weirder because I usually counted the wording as-printed rather than in Oracle (examples of exceptions: I used the Oracle version of Cycling reminder text rather than Saga’s, and the Oracle wording of Sentinel). The old templates are, um, interesting. Since it’s a pile of mixed rarity competing with some of R&D’s tightest groups of commons, I see this as a being quite an achievement. The range of 15-23 words is my target zone to confine future changes; since three words x360 is enough space to swap fifteen vanilla creatures for fifteen Search for Tomorrows, this doesn’t feel terribly confining, and mostly serves to make both drafting and gameplay more smooth.

Frequent Rotation

One of the other advantages of using a less powerful cube is that newly added cards don’t have to be insane to keep up with the cardpool. I could put in Hill Giant without tragedy, although it wouldn’t be very good. I have a few hundred candidate cards on the sidelines awaiting a slot, and I’ve kept all the rotated cards in their own pile for eventual re-introduction except a few that I’m sure I don’t want to bring back (for example, Linessa, Zephyr Mage and Disintegrate were each too decisive).

I’ll often change something simply for the sake of change. Moroii and Fireshrieker are examples of cool cards that I cut simply because they’d been in too long. I’m starting to get a sense of the cards I never want to cut—my Legends Azure Drake, Ravnica bouncelands like Azorius Chancery, Benalish Lancer, Recoil—but eventually I might even let those take a turn on the sidelines. The perpetual freshness of being able to create my own version of Time Spiral every on an evolving basis is the core appeal of the cube format to me.

I predict that, once I have a fairly stable core that I’m comfortable with as a baseline, I’ll more intentionally develop packages of cards to rotate in together, like devoting 60 cards to spiritcraft/arcane or emphasizing the graveyard or making Morph a more major theme. I’ve already got some more bizarre rares (e.g., Form of the Dragon) included to encourage more gameplay diversity, and those slots are another avenue for keeping the cube fresh.

The greatest challenge, honestly, is to find interesting red cards. Red desperately needs to do more than mete out damage points. I can only lean so much on temporary stealing and land sacrifice as subthemes.

Ways to Play

Of course, an eight-person booster draft is the Platonic ideal of cube play, and certainly six- and four-person variants of the same thing are common. But as we all know, sometimes it’s not that easy to point eight people in the same direction for several hours at a time. One of the things this cube, in particular, lends itself to is a cobbled-together play setup, due to having a creature density comparable to ordinary sets and no reliance on combos to generate playable Limited decks. (Don’t get me wrong, there’s abundant synergy: the bounce-heavy deck I mentioned also ninjitsu’d Ninja of the Deep Hours into play, returning Mulldrifter and replaying it. Broken!)

Sealed works fine, and you can dial the power up or down to taste simply by how many cards go to each player. I haven’t tried splitting the cube in half yet, but now I kind of want to—maybe with an exciting, difficult 15- or 20-minute deckbuilding time limit. I also haven’t done 30-card pools yet, but it sounds excruciating, in a good way.

For my money, though, the second-best way to play after actually drafting the cube is a variant I read about on the mothership in a non-cube context: MindMaster (see: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/352 for a more thorough exegesis). Give each player fifteen random cards as an opening hand, no hand-size limit or library, and the ability to put a basic land of any type into play ten times per game. You can add more rules to make more cards work within the format, or just live with cards like Tidings being blank (sometimes having blanks is an important resource).

The faux packs are almost always a fair match, and games go 10 to 30 minutes. In the cases when one person gets dramatically better cards, the game is usually over mercifully fast to mitigate the un-fun-ness. Land picks are skill-testing, since the cube has higher colored-mana requirements than regular sets. The limit on free basics is an anti-stalling rule, and it reins in cards like Pegasus Stampede that might otherwise be too good (even Sacred Mesa weakens when you had to use six or seven land drops on other colors).

Other cubes have vicious densities of removal spells, especially mass removal, which really cuts into the playability of MindMaster, and regular packs have far too many chaff cards to be consistently balanced.

I hope this outline gives you a window into a different kind of cube, and some ideas to potentially improve your own.

-Phil Stanton
“DrSylvan” on Magic forums everywhere
prstanto at gmail dot com

Dealing with the Problem Children

There are a handful of cards that are the basis of debate amongst Cube designers. I have discussed my thoughts on each, and offered an argument of inclusion or exclusion.

Armageddon

Thea Steele makes the point
that Armageddon is simply not a fun card to play against. Wizards keep careful tabs on how cards, both collectively and individually, rate on the ‘fun’ scale. Unsurprisingly, counterspells and land destruction come out high on the ‘un-fun’ end of the continuum. While I take all marketing data with a grain of salt, I fully respect that these guys have spent a lot of time and effort working this out.

Old-school players remember Armageddon and Winter Orb from the early days. Get ahead (often with a four-mana 4/5 with a minor drawback) and wreck the board. Some of the white weenie drafters have this as a key strategic element, and I am sympathetic to this. On balance, I’ve left Armaggeddon and Ravages of War out: the reasoning is that the happiness that a player winning with these will almost always be more than offset by the corresponding grumpiness of the opponent.

I think Hokori, Dust Drinker is a great substitute though. Winter Orb is trickier. It will probably go in next rotation.

Sinkhole
Land destruction has not costed two mana for a long time. The fact that Stone Rain has not seen core set action for many years ought to be a guide to Wizards’ policy of moving the ‘deemed un-fun’ cards to the scrapheap. I think these two cards (along with Ice Storm and even Thermokarst) have a role to play in Cube drafting and I have retained them for aggressive disruption and proactive denial strategies. Mana denial can be drafted as an archetype, however this under-costed gem tends to go early. I think its effect is more legitimate than Armageddon, even though it has a vastly larger footprint on eternal formats. Strip Mine, however, is a complete no-go zone. Wasteland has been pulled, then returned to the Cube, several times (Lotus Vale, anyone?).

Mind’s Desire
This is rubbish, but I want to storm combo a viable choice. The great difficulty, of course, is that fast mana goes very early, and storm is crippled without it. My plan is to put more storage lands (even, gasp, Fallen Empires ones) to enable the “single big turn” strategies to be a valid archetype.

Time Vault
This is just too good. Even without Voltaic Key, Time Vault is obscenely powerful. With the key, it is simply the single best two-card combination (and note that neither are coloured or expensive) in Magic. Played about twenty games with the same two decks where I had Sensei’s Divining Top and Counterbalance and my friend had this combination. Not even remotely close (I won 2/20). While I do acknowledge that there is fun discovering the subtleties of Cube drafting, and the novelty of having cards like this in a pool is thrilling, don’t be afraid to pull this when things get degenerate.

Sensei’s Divining Top
Still annoying as hell. If you take out Time Vault, this becomes the de facto Tinker et al target and makes life hellish. For issue of trust, I would recommend taking out Counterbalance too!

Contract from Below
Depending on how you engineer your points system for ante, this is either completely busted or merely very, very good. I have found it leads to some fun situations with our “one open, one blind” ante rule (each player antes two cards: one face-up, one face down). By adding another two cards to your ante, the Contract adds a significant element of risk to your game. Other tables take notice when it goes on the stack.

Wrath of God
In my Cube, I have put mass removal at a premium. While the “big three” have been included (Wrath of God, Damnation, Day of Judgement), I wanted both spot removal and lesser mass removal to have more meaning and impact. This means than second-tier removal, such as Rout, Hallowed Burial, Mutilate, Akroma’s Vengeance, Austere Command has been curtailed (although, at seven mana, Martial Coup and Sunscour have been included). With little mass removal, drafters have to assess second- and third-tier removal (such as Douse in Gloom or Cleansing Beam) slightly differently than in Cubes where high-quality kill spells are plentiful.

Importantly, your players need to know this! I recommend all Cube owners maintain a list of “cheat sheets” with the following:

• Counterspells (sorted by mana cost).
• 0-cost spells (Force of Will, Mindbreak Trap etc)
• Mass removal
• Morphs

Print these out, and have them available for all players. This is a simple method for maintaining the trust of your play groups(s).

Nevinyrral’s Disk
Similarly, this does not make the Cube. Something about this screams “1995” to me. It reminds me of times gone by that, while fun, I think I should move on from. I don’t think it’s spectacularly unbalanced, but still feel it’s too “swingy” and detracts from the skill challenge of Cube drafting. Engineered Explosives and Pernicious Deed are in the Cube, but I feel these require a more “massaging” by their users than the Disk in order to get a reward.

Booster Tutor
I love this card. The text on the one in our Cube reads “Search the allocated booster pack for a card and then put that card into your hand. You own that card.” It gets less powerful as the evening wears on because the “allocated booster” gets smaller with each use. However, the joy of plucking a Baneslayer Angel at precisely the right moment AND adding it to your pool is priceless.

Counterspell
This is controversial. I don’t doubt that most people disagree with me here, but I think Wizards has got it right in moving generic countermagic from UU to 1UU. It comes down to strategic decisions and bluffing untapped lands for 1UU requires much more thought than only two lands. That said, there are a few sub-three mana counterspells in the Cube: Memory Lapse, Remand (because they are “soft” counters), Arcane Denial, Mana Tithe (for disruption in white), and Mana Drain.

Yes, the latter is the best counterspell in the game. It then becomes something of a focal point (see Ancestral Recall). The blowouts it causes tend to get heard by everyone in the room!

Duress
I like Duress, but haven’t put it in. Thoughtseize is in, but black in general is removal-centric in its spells, with creatures providing more card disruption. I might be completely wrong on this point, and ought to at least give Duress a chance. I think black might also be creature-light (particularly small black creatures).

Grindstone
There is a HUUUGE difference between Counter-Top and Painter’s Servant and this card (cough.. creature removal .. cough). Grindstone is cute, and can work with reanimator and dredging decks too.

Oath of Druids
It’s just as good as I thought. It is officially “on notice” in case it gets silly. Interestingly, this card is the worst culprit for complexity: it has only one ability and the Oracle text for it is EIGHT lines deep. This card broke the back of a newer player in one of the groups. After reading it, he politely suggested we play some other game.

Natural Order
Has entered the Cube, but yet to try. I think there may be some tears.

Tinker
It’s so easy to dislike this card, because the effect is so overt (whereas Sol Ring‘s ridiculousness takes a while to see). Second-turn Inkwell Leviathan is very hard to come back from (which reminds me, must put more small deathtouch creatures in…).

It’s possible that my lack of “real” Vintage experience is one reason why I am a little soft on this card. I haven’t experienced enough Sundering Titan joy.

Sundering Titan
It is just awful to experience, even where it might not be the hardest to defeat (Progenitus, Inkwell Leviathan, Emrakul, the Aons Torn are harder). There is some evidence that land destruction is the one of the generic “un-fun” components of MTG, and Wizards have been scaling back the potency of these effects (see Sinkhole and Armageddonabove). Sundering Titan has the additional problem of asymmetry: where both players suffer (as with Armageddon) there is some element of mitigation (even if illusory). In draft, it is difficult to achieve a complete one-sided sunder, but it is a truely dire feeling when it occurs.

Isochron Scepter
If Vault-Key is banned, Counter-Top is banned, why not take the next logical step? I have left the Sceptre in the Cube, primarily because the assembly of Sceptre-Chant (which is in) is ever-so-slightly less viable. Firstly, Orim’s Chant, while in the Cube as a disrupting tool for white, is seldom worth a card on its own outside of this purpose. Secondly, the Sceptre’s imprint ability has the inherent 2-for-1 drawback. Thirdly, there are very few sub-three mana counterspells in the Cube, and these are the most irritating of imprints. This is sufficiently safe to remain in my mind.

Sol Ring
Many power-rating lists consider this the premier power card. In limited, its usefulness is superior to the Moxen, and playing against it feel somewhat like bringing a toothpick to gunfight. I think my major gripe is that experienced players will always pick it: I have been passed Ancestral Recall in a final pack, but never this. Still, the power imbalance is less “in your face” and, like Library of Alexandria, I hope that the joyous moment of good fortune overshadows the grumbling of opponents later in the evening.

Pernicious Deed/Engineered Explosives/Ratchet Bomb/Powder Keg
I feel that these have hoops to jump through, and that players ought to be rewarded for doing so. In this way, I think these are differentiated from the Disk, and have the pleasant upside of rewarding skill in a more satisfying way.

Mother of Runes
White creatures have a lot of protection effects. This is a characteristic of the colour, and an important part of Magic itelf. However, I am pained to add protection and shroud effects willy-nilly to the Cube. They reduce interaction between the players. It’s not that I hate white- (or black-) based weenie strategies, but too many can create an antisocial experience. This is why I have not put Paladin en-Vec or this card into the Cube. There are already a few protection weenies, but I think Knight of Meadowgrain is more fair AND more fun than Auriok Champion.

That’s it for today. In the next part, I will talk about the aesthetic element of Cubing.

- Simon Walker

Special thanks to Simon for this piece! If you want to contribute to cubedrafting.com, here’s how! -Thea

“What do you call a Minotaur wearing a mortar-board? A Doctor of Bovinity”
A Sacred Cow is, according to the repository of all knowledge, a “metaphorical object immune from criticism”. In Cube design, these are beliefs so fundamental that they don’t budge. After reading many of the myriad articles on Cube design, I compiled a short list:

1. Cubes are symmetric.
2. Cube-drafting follows Magic draft conventions.
3. Cubes are singleton.
4. Cubes contain Magic cards.

Before I delve into the content of my own Cube (which, you may have noticed, I have avoided for two articles already), I will analyse each of these, offer reasons why these are “sacred”, and suggest that you might be better off sending them sent to graduate from Bovine University.

Cubist symmetry

Every list I have ever seen in Cube drafting articles contains rigid symmetry. This includes: identical number of cards (and card types) in each colour, complete cycles of colour-fixers (such as Ravnica signets and Karoos), precise numbers in each hybrid and multi-colour pair, artifact numbers matching multi/hybrid numbers… The generic explanation for this contains the word “balance” in it somewhere (I think this might be Tom’s article from 2007 ).

To quote Tom:
“One subtle thing that I think is key is that players who have never seen your cube before need be able to trust you. By this, I mean that if someone were to see a narrow card in your cube that supports a niche strategy and ask you if they can draft a deck around it, the answer should always be yes. For example, seeing Buried Alive and Crusade indicates to a player that there are enough cards to support Reanimator and White Weenie. If they try to draft one of those strategies and those cards aren’t there, they will feel betrayed.”

I completely agree with Tom’s point. The purpose of having precise symmetry across colours is to give enable drafters (particularly those new to your Cube) an impression that no particular colour has been favoured or otherwise has more depth than the others. Trust also extends to card combinations. I learned this late when a long-time MTG player said that he drafted Tooth and Nail and Triskelion with the hope of a late Mephidross Vampire. I really felt that I had let him down by not thinking that through. Having players trust the Cube list is vastly more important than perfecting the symmetry.

There is, of course, another big problem that arises when the most powerful cards in Magic are put into one environment: one colour is simply better than the others.

The problem child

Tristan Shaun Gregson had a great article on balancing power across the colours. He humorously noted that colour power rankings went as follows:
1. Blue 2. Red 3. Black 4. Green 5. Artifacts 6. Lands 7. White

More recently, Thea Steele notes that white gets something of a bad rap, particularly from new drafters.

I certainly agree with Thea’s comment that ” … if a color seems to have all of its good cards focused on a certain effect, it’s a mistake to try to push that color towards something else. Instead, colors like red and green that do a few things really well will be stronger if you make them more focused. By emphasizing effects that have a lot of redundancy (like acceleration in green and burn and LD in red), you create more consistency within that color.”

In Vintage, Blue is the THE colour. The two most broken coloured spells in Magic are Blue (their printed costs are U and 1U but their “fair” cost is 3UU and 3UU respectively). Counterspells are uniquely Blue. The best planeswalker is Blue. Blue dominates card-advantage. Blue forms a critical part of most of dedicated combo decks. Blue has some of the elite creatures of Magic in its arsenal. Blue is the colour of control, and control is traditionally the most powerful strategy in Cube drafting.

As a result, Blue is more than a desirable colour to play in Vintage-level Cube drafts: broken Blue spells are almost always drafted ahead of archetypes or other colours. Subsequently, Blue dual-lands become higher picks than other lands, and every player soon learns to snap up Misty Rainforests and Breeding Pools on the off chance that Time Walk, Meluko, the Clouded Mirror, Mystical Tutor or Gifts Ungiven come by later.

This poses a challenge to Cube drafters. Some resolve the issue by cutting back on the power. Our strategy for coping with this phenomenon is to split Blue into “light” and “heavy” blue. Cards like Cryptic Command, Future Sight, Arcanis the Omnipotent and Mind Over Matter can’t be splashed for. By emphasising cards with high blue commitment (and high power) and ignoring the “splash for Ancestral Recall” issue, Blue now occupies a different space than in most Cubes. Drafting solid amounts of Blue has its own rewards. By putting “fish”-style aggressive intensive blue creatures (such as Coralhelm Commander and Lord of Atlantis) and minimising “easy” splashes (there is no Power Sink, Control Magic or even the Counterspell in this Cube), drafters need to make a lateral set of choices. There are still goodies such as Mana Drain and Forbid, but an automatic blue-control drafting strategy requires far more commitment and this curtails the habit of drafters always picking Blue duals and always moving into progressively more Blue where the opportunity presents.

Returning to Tom’s point about players feeling “cheated” when the support cards don’t turn up. It is very important to give a heads up to all and sundry before drafting. This is doubly important where experienced Cube players are expecting the quality and density of counterspells found in “powerhouse” draft Cubes.

Cube-drafting follows draft convention

Three packs of fifteen cards is the norm. I have pondered this for some time now. If we weren’t paying by the pack, how many boosters would be too much? One of the simple pleasures of limited Magic is “the rush”. That thrill of opening a fresh booster and scanning through it. Much like the breakthrough moment of solving a Soduku puzzle, finding an elegant solution to a long-standing problem, or winning a battle of wits against a wily foe: cracking boosters is great fun.

Some Cube authors achieve this through reduced booster sizes. This has a lot of advantages, particularly if there is a strong power drop-off rate after pick seven or so. I thought for quite some time about having rarities reflected in boosters. That is, each would contain the following:

1 White common
1 Black common
1 Blue common
1 Green common
1 Red common
1 Multi/hybrid common
1 Land common
1 Artifact common
3 Uncommons
1-2 Rares
0-1 Mythic
2 Random slots

When determining which cards to be in a particular rarity, I made the following rules:
All legendary permanents (including planeswalkers) are uncommon.
All uncommons are legendary permanents.
Power 9, Time Vault, Timetwister and Contract from Below are mythic (probably should add Sol Ring to this list).
Unrestricted tutors, fast mana, mass removal, and single-card combo cards and equipment* (that is, cards with tier-1 decks built around them) are rares.
Everything else is common (including all non-legendary creatures).

* (Thea Steele, in analyzing the elegant Sword of Body and Mind, notes that “[a]ll of the Swords are really powerful in the Cube — they win games on their own” and “[t]his cycle is so huge for the Cube that I’m actually a little worried about the implications of including all five, if they are all printed.” )

We tried drafting this, and it was mediocre. Rather than rewarding archetypes, rares would always be first-picked, and players would feel awful passing fast mana or tutors (which are very strong in this format). In the end I recanted, and chalked up another “nice in theory, poor in practice” learning experience. The Cube has retained the rarities for each card though, and this is somewhat helpful for the inexperienced drafter (and, as you would have read previously, they need every bit of help).

Pig Drafting

One upon a time I would head to an FNM each Sunday in central Melbourne. Numbers had been dwindling for some time, and after a few months, there were only three remaining. Still wanting to crack packs, we Winston drafted two packs each, and “pig-drafted” the last four cards in each pack (i.e. rare, 3 uncommons and either a foil or a common). It works like this:
1 Carefully open the booster face-down.
2 Take the top four cards and shuffle them (leaving the rest of the pack aside).
3 Deal the cards out in a line in front of you.
3a The first card (“open”) gets flipped over (so all can see).
3b The second card (“blind”) you can look at (without revealing to others).
3c The third card (“hidden”) remains face down (no-one will see this).
3d The fourth card (“top”) goes to your forehead without looking (so everyone bar you can see).
4 Starting with the eldest (or the player with the highest limited DCI ranking), that player may make one offer of any number of her or his cards for any number of cards belonging to one other player.
5 That player can respond only with “yes” or “no”. No other communication is allowed.
6 If the offer is accepted, the transacted cards are exchanged.
7 The player to the left of the eldest player can then make an offer to any player (including one who has previously offered or accepted a deal).
8 After each player has twice had the opportunity to make an offer, all cards you have bargained for get added to that player’s pool.

This is a hilarious, and highly skill-intensive, method of drafting any “odd” boosters left over in the Cube. It is a way for the “trading” element of Magic to be incorporated into drafting and I highly recommend trying it.

Cubes are singleton

Fundamentally, I agree that Cube drafting is inherently a singleton format. This has the obvious effect of excluding certain cards (Squadron Hawk, all ripple and grandeur keywords, and of course, Plague Rats). Some Cube designers, particularly those with balanced, all-common Cubes, redress this with redundancy (for a good article on redundancy check out this one by Adam Styborski). This is a mature and sensible solution that adds predictability to a Cube and increases the trust of players. I think this is more elegant than ad hoc solutions (such as allowing a player to added additional Squadron Hawks etc).

Cubes contain Magic cards

This may seem like a dumb statement. Clearly I’m not advocating replacing cards with L5R or Munchkin. However, players and Cube designers might benefit and enjoy having the occasional designed card added to the Cube.

If showcasing your talent as a game designer is important, by all means try it. As a rule, our Cube must have <1% designed cards, and the power level for each can’t be on par with Dark Confidant et al. So far, they are all low picks, and I am a bit happy about that.

The point here is that some designers and players recoil in horror at the thought of DIY cards (and, until recently, I was one of them). I am not advocating a position either way. All I suggest is that, like the other sacred cows detailed above, give it a bit of thought.

That’s it for Part 3. Next episode is an analysis of “problem children” in Cube drafts.

In part 1, I examined six concepts that form a loose “wish list” of things that I wanted in my Cube: Shandalar, ante, invitational cards, trading, archetypes, and making basic lands matter. It discussed the relationship between items in the wish list and concepts of “fun” that differ in each of my MTG playgroups.

In part 2, I will solidify some of these by making some hard decisions. In particular, how the real world places limitations on what we can achieve in our Cube design goals. Finally, there are some suggestions for saving a few dollars in your Cube.

Restriction breeds creativity

Mark Rosewater has harped on for years about this. This is why the “level up” mechanic was intentionally made sorcery speed rather than Figure of Destiny-style (and not accidentally why I think Rise was one of the best booster draft formats WotC has ever produced). Making difficult decisions can be fun, but it can be frustrating (and thus aversionary) to new players. One of the goals of the MTG design team is not to isolate new players by overwhelming them from the outset with tough and complicated choices (in deck-building or playing). In this article, I assert that Cube drafters are not new players. In fact, I would hazard to say that Vintage Cube drafters are extremely knowledgeable about Magic: how the complex rules work, how to implement specific playing and drafting strategies, and in particular they simply know the names and mechanics of more cards.

I have retained the assumption that Cube drafters are highly knowledgeable. If it turns out to be completely false, I will reassess (and hopefully write about that in a future article).

(As another side note, try going to Gatherer and click the “random” button twenty times. For each card, think of a story you have from playing, collecting and reading about Magic that relates to that card. If you have 20 stories, you’re a Legend (awful pun intended). If you have 16-19, you’re pretty knowledgeable and 10-15 is okay. Vintage Cube is an extremely challenging experience if you aren’t familiar with most cards in the game).

A straightforward response to the restriction argument is this: If Cube drafting is the best of Magic, and I am trying to give players freedom to pick the archetypes, why place arbitrary limits on this at all?

There are three responses to this:

1. Players are experienced. All things held equal, good players will draft the best deck they can, using the best cards they can. By putting in the Cube only the abstractly most powerful cards in Magic, this becomes a linear exercise: blue-white control, red burn, black discard with the remainder of the pool as “filler” that supports this.

2. Each Cube is unique. I want this one to have great variety in synergies. There are two ways to go about this. The “carrot” approach uses positive techniques such as increasing the density of cards from underdone archetypes (Amrou Scout, Woodland Changeling, Coldsnap Duals, Time Spiral and Fallen Empires storage lands). The “stick” approach is using negative techniques to dissuade players (such as colour hosers and reduced density of support cards).

3. Novelty is fun. Losing to something bizarre or unexpected is often more memorable that losing to the same blue-white control, red burn, black discard for an entire evening. Drafting a novel archetype and succeeding ought to reward the times your less-than-successful attempts at making your kobold-and-elf Storm deck work.

With that off my chest, I will move to the most challenging restriction on Cube design: dollars.

The real world

Wizards is a superb gaming company. It has a good business model. It has consistent, cash-based revenue streams. It invests strongly in new product design and development. It has a healthy customer base that it listens to carefully.

I can remember the “bad old days” when gaming companies (cough.. TSR.. cough) did not have such a firm base. Bizarre rule books, poorly-implemented supplements, ad hoc products and unbalanced gaming environments were the norm. Even the early days of WotC contained a few lamentable stratagems (different card backs for expansions, Chronicles, Lifelace). Tournaments were slow and disorganised.

One of the wonderful things about re-entering Magic was the fantastically organised modern tournaments. Rounds were fast. Judges got promo foils. Judges had cool shirts. Judges knew the rules(!). I didn’t care that it was $50 or whatever for a pre-release: it had so much less mucking around than I remembered from 1996.

Since I started again in 2005, I have made a strong point of defending the WotC business model. It’s not perfect (see: 8 card boosters, Saviours of Kamigawa, cutting our local PTQs (our nearest is now 850 miles / 1,350 km away), but it’s sustainable, and this alone makes it better than any other in history. Defending the business model involves defending the IP.

Cash for cardboard

The IP in collectable card games is unique. The proprietary rights that WotC owns that flow from Magic are not that dissimilar to other printed material. Copying cards is, in simple terms, strictly illegal. Running a Tarmogoyf through a colour photocopier and using it on the kitchen table is analogous to whipping a CD onto a memory stick and plugging it into your home theatre system. What is trickier is taking a Sharpie to an Island to “make” a Tarmogoyf. In that situation, the underlying IP you are using (that is, the concept of a green creature with power and toughtness etc) is still Wizards’, but you “own” the particular construction.

The point that I want to make here is that, regardless of how dissimilar your proxy cards are to a “real” Black Lotus, WotC still owns the underlying material. I want to be clear that I believe all players in the Magic community ought to fight Tooth and Nail to ensure those rights are upheld. For our purposes, this is only relevant if you one day decide to sell your Cube: if you use proxies, you cannot dispose of you Cube for any consideration whatsoever.

This is a very important point for me personally (although, after the time invested, I never intend to dispose of my Cube), both as a law student and someone who wants to see this game continue for at least another decade or two. Regardless of the methods used to generate proxies (Photoshop, MSE, Apprentice or a bit of ink) it is important to not release the IP to another party, to acknowledge Wizards and the respective artist, not to bring the brand into disrepute (e.g. using offensive images and playing in a public area) and (most importantly) not to profit from it.

Not profiting from the use of WotC IP is so straightforward it should barely need mentioning. The other issue with regards to Cube proxies is the “fair dealing” rule. Most jurisdictions allow a small portion of works to be copied for private and/or educational purposes. There is no hard-and-fast rule as to the actual proportion. However, if the work is evenly distributed, the starting point is usually 10%. With that in mind, I am not proxying more than one tenth of all unique cards (there are about 10,000), and not more than one tenth of any set. Most Cubes are less than a thousand cards, so even proxying the entire thing will be unlikely to hit this. To satisfy the second point, avoid proxying more than 15-20 cards from any single Magic expansion for your Cube.

The issue of using proxies, after the legal bit, comes back to your overriding goals (see part 1). For me, it is not merely an aesthetic vs cost trade-off. My goals involve ante, invitation cards, Shandalar-esque trading and trying to give basics some value. I remember reading about Kai Budde’s invitational win in 2001 (on the back of Jewelled Bird), and thought that Mark Rosewater’s tournament rules (involving the SCG cost of each card) might be a neat idea to base the Cube on. Thus, by printing the dollar-value of each card onto that card, the winner can be determined by the most “dollars” won in the evening. This quickly became an idea I wanted to pursue.

Firstly, if I am using real Magic cards, then the thought of stamping “$13″ onto a planeswalker (or $73 onto Underground Sea!) didn’t appeal. I considered putting a stick on the inside of the playing sleeves (outside would not work with shuffling). I tried a few and it was predominantly unsuccessful. I also discovered that the only place on a magic card to put this sticker has been taken up by the nice people from Ultra Pro.

I remembered the extensible features of MSE and had a play with these. I found that I could add fields and re-arrange existing ones with a bit of trial and error. It while doing this that I contemplated proxying all cards in the Cube.

The whole hog

I mulled over this idea for quite some time, and did some calculations:

Rough cost of unpowered, Vintage cube (without 3rd ed duals):
Basics x 400 @ ~$0 = $0.00 (no-one values basics…)
Staple commons x 100 @ $0.10 = $10.00
Staple uncommons x 100 @ $0.30 = $30.00
Quirky rares x 250 @ $1.00 = $250.00
Staple rares x 100 @ $4.00 = $400.00
Pricey rares x 50 @ $8.00 = $400.00

Based on my 3 minute guesstimate, an unpowered, dual-free cube was looking at a bit over $1k (less those taken from my collection).

Adding duals x 10 @ $50 = $500 extra
Adding power = $3000 extra

Rough cost of a cube done with proxies:
Basics x 400 @ ~$0 = $0.00
Others x 600 @ $0.20 = $120.00

This is seems pretty obvious. However, now add in your time (this has been estimated ex post facto, that is, retrospectively with the “gift” of hindsight):
(creating, printing, cutting, pasting, flattening, trimming, sleeving)
Creating (artwork, oracle text, price, coding) = 12 mins/card
Printing (creating output files, printer queuing) = 0.5 mins/card
Cutting (chopping A4 sheet) = 1.5 mins/card
Flattening (prevent curling) = 0.5 mins/card
Trimming (getting edges right) = 0.5 mins/card
Sleeving I have ignored (as it occurs for both).

Estimate per card ~15 minutes.

Thus:
Basics x 400 @ 0 = 0 hours
Others x 600 @ 15mins/card = 125 hours

This is the most damning of calculations: for a decent sized Cube without P9 or duals, you will almost certainly be better-off purchasing or trading for the cards. That is, unless you have a lot of free time (and don’t value it highly) or you have alternate goals for the artwork, layout or “feel” for cards in your Cube (as I describe later).

Below are some tips for saving time and money:

Hybrid Cubes

It is not uncommon for Cube owners to proxy expensive cards only (I believe Evan Erwin does this), and this would seem a fair compromise. This can be achieved with stickers (so as not to increase the width significantly), painting directly onto a basic land, or simply using a Sharpie. I would expect that most Cubes with Power 9 in the “real world” would have at least a few cards proxied this way.

Pooling

One of the most frustrating things about having a “seeded” Cube is the need to grab a particular rare for a standard/extended/eternal tournament. Having a fifth copy of Baneslayer Angel is a luxury few of us can afford, and for that reason people have been known to pool together to create a Cube. There are several (seemingly obvious but they catch people out and destroy friendships) tips for this.

1. Be VERY CAREFUL to document ownership of each card. I would recommend using Google Documents or similar to track changes and keep a hard-copy of the list with the Cube.
2. Create strict rules of redemption (that is, conditions for removing cards from the Cube once in it).
3. Organise insurance (or at least who will bear the costs if cards are lost or damaged).

Donation as entry fee

When we have a “Cube evening”, I put on food and beer (my wife has a chemistry degree and is an avid home-brewer: bonus!). Taking a donation as “entry fees” and/or as prizes for the evening is a viable method to increase the pool. However, it can only supplement an existing Cube, few people give “money rares” (i.e. the very cards that are scarce in most Cubes), and resentment can brew (ho ho) if some players contribute fetches and others merely dollar rares.

Choosing your poison

Hopefully, this article has given you, the reader, some tips (or at least, offered some sort of warning).

In part 3, I will move onto the content (the fun part) of a new Cube and discuss Sacred Cows.

Part 4 is a discussion of important cards to consider when determining the texture of your Cube.

In part 5, I will discuss the aesthetics of Cubism, explain why trying to proxy 700 cards is a dumb idea, and reflect on some things best left underdone.

- Simon Walker

Special thanks to Simon for this piece! If you want to contribute to cubedrafting.com, here’s how! -Thea

There are many articles on Cube design and the underlying philosophy behind what lies within (for example, try this one). In this series, I want to take a step further back and examine the “why” before beginning on the “what”. Like studying ethics, there are no magic bullets, perfect theories or imperatives. I hope that anyone reading picks up one or two new ideas, or develops a novel way of looking at old ones.

When pondering how to construct a cube, I thought it appropriate, before doing anything else, to ask myself several hard questions:

Introspection: Why am I doing this and what do I want to achieve?
Finance: How much will it cost?
Elegance: How can thoughtful design augment the result?

These things form the basis of this series of articles.

Introduction

Building a Cube is a non-trivial task. Without trying to be crass, this is neither an opinion nor an educated guess. As far as I can see, it’s simply a fact (that I wish wasn’t the case!). Before taking any concrete steps into committing to a long-standing Cube, I spent quite some time analysing the four questions above. Rushing head-first into any large endeavour is almost never wise. With cubes, it is enticing to plunge into a list of cards. If you, the reader, can take away one thing from this article, it is to be thoughtful about the purpose of your Cube. I hope here is that you might get tips on how to go about fulfilling that purpose (and avoid frustrating and expensive pitfalls).

Why do I want to build this?

If you have ever experienced the “joy” of general business degree courses, you might have heard this mantra before: “who is your customer?” Building cubes is pretty much the same thing. Are you building for a small group of close friends or wider circles? Importantly, gauging the skill level of your audience is critical.

One of the pitfalls I fell into was misjudging this: with play groups in multiple cities, I failed to recognise that some had less exposure to older sets and “common” draft strategies. The result was a frustrating and un-fun series of mismatches, and a genuine sense that, in a burst of optimism, I had failed to understand the needs of those around me.

Introspection starts with determining what you want, but this must be tempered with the environment you operate in. Vintage cubes with Oath of Druids (seriously, give a new player an Oracle-updated copy of that card and see how long it takes to sink in) generally suit players with lots of experience, whereas common cubes have a wider scope.

To derive my list of design features, I started by thinking about the fun aspects of MTG. More correctly, I mapped out what my concept of “fun” is, and how I perceive others in my various MTG playgroups might differ from this. My personal list of fun things I conceived as “fun” aspects of a Cube were:

1. Shandalar
2. Ante
3. Magic Invitational Cards
4. Trading
5. Drafting famous archetypes
6. Making basic land cards matter

I then analysed why each of these falls within my own concept of fun, how those around me might see these differently, and what this means for a Cube.

Thinking about Shandalar

Back in the 1980s, an up-and-coming software developer called Sid Meier was writing landmark “simulation” games (such as Pirates!, Gunship, Airbourne Ranger, F15 Strike Eagle and Civilization) for a fledgling outfit called Microprose. Some time in the 1990s Microprose snapped up the licence to produce a Magic: The Gathering game. Microprose followed the “simulation” theme by having the player strut his or her stuff as a planeswalker wandering freely through the land of Shandalar.

I loaded up Duels of the Planewalkers (the original game plus two expansions, not the XBox one) a few years back and it was still remarkably entertaining.

I really liked the limits placed on a fledgling planeswalker: you start off with a handful of AWFUL revised-era cards. You then try to run between a few villages buying and selling cards to make something even vaguely resembling a real deck. There is no “four of” restriction: you are limited only by what you can scrape together in-game. However, starting the game in essentially dire (planeswalker) poverty means that you have to look for utility in quite unusual areas (Osai Vultures, Merfolk of the Pearl Trident, Pearled Unicorn …). The game is designed to operate in a “from small acorns” mode. It uses ante and it’s awesome (despite moments such as losing your Moxen to a lucky Sedge Troll).

A simple way of expressing why I find this fun is that the joy lies in the journey. The “from small acorns” struggle of an acolyte wizard builds a sense of accomplishment. Somehow, I want to incorporate this into the Cube-drafting experience: an evening (or more?) of drafting forms a campaign.

Of the six items on the wish list, I think this one generates the least controversy. Even the hard-core, veteran players would benefit from an occasional draft where they can advance their decks throughout the evening.

Other items on the list, however, might invoke some bad memories.

Revisiting ante

I won a pre-release recently at our local store, and at the time I was pretty sure it was the only such win in my life. A few days later, I remembered that we played Magic as teenagers (from Revised though Mirage … then we discovered beer, women and cars)(not simultaneously, but you get the idea). Turns out, the only other time I had won a pre-release involved ante. I vaguely remember the fear of losing my game-winner, Grinning Totem. It seems odd, but it was exciting to be risking something when going into battle. This feeling of risk and commensurate reward was something that I wanted in a Cube environment.

Another “upside” of putting ante into a cube is the meaningful addition of Contract From Below and friends.

This is one area that I could see a divergence in what people in my target playgroups might consider “fun”. The idea of drafting a “build-around-me” card in P1P1, such as Tooth and Nail or Dragonstorm, and then losing it first round would be cripplingly un-fun. This would need addressing when determining the structure of the Cube.

What I also hadn’t realised until recently, was that one of the invitation events had an ante component, and that the players hated it. Kai Budde (and I quote) said of it: “Now I could probably Tinker up something impressive to stop the Hatred kill. Or I could be a d-bag and Tinker up a Jeweled Bird, which was worth fifty cents, exchange it for my anted card, lose the game, and win the Invitational.”

Another problem is that there is a massive skew in power level between the ante cards: Contract From Below, as printed, would be utterly broken and Timmerian Fiends laughably awful. This I see a practical issue rather than a conceptual impossibility (read Patrick Chaplin’s article), but one should always be wary of trying to push square pegs into round holes.

For this item of wish list, I resolved to keep an open mind. If ante failed to be fun, ditch it.

Invitational and Make-Your-Own cards

As mentioned above, I did not have much to do with Magic for a decade or so. I remember reading something about Dark Confidant being designed by a guy who had won a tournament and thought “Wow! What an awesome prize”.

It was not until a bit later that I discovered that:
1 There were in fact a half-dozen or so such cards; and,
2 There was no way to enter these tournaments.

The second of these made me a bit sad. The thought of making cards and adding them to the Cube (in extremely moderate quantities) really appealed to me.

This generates a strong love-it-or-loathe-it response from seasoned players. The most straightforward comment is that a game with made-up cards simply is not Magic. As it happens, the three target groups for the Cube probably would not mind the odd non-broken card (or art altered to put someone’s likeness in it). The benefit of being able to add your own after a win has the feel of a tangible reward.

Clearly, losing to a poorly-designed monstrosity would be awful: I would hate to “lose” to something that isn’t even a magic card. Another practical difficulty is that each designed card would need proxying (and re-printing if too strong). On balance, though, I think this is a worthy design goal and may enhance the Cube (even if only to provide a tangible reward to the victor).

Trading

You have probably all heard stories of “three Mox Pearls for a Serra Angel” trades from Magic’s early days. The asymmetry of information, while creating some horrifically unfair scenarios, added to the excitement. In establishing principles for creating a Cube environment, I wanted to incorporate this.

Additionally, trading is a skill that can be tested like any other. An endearing influence is the board game Settlers of Catan. This was a game I had read about before purchasing a copy in 2002. By late 2003 a very large percentage of my friends were hooked (with several purchasing their own copies and expansion sets). One of the skills tested in the game is bargaining, and I remember fondly many enjoyable evenings (as another side note: I found it is one of the very few games that my female friends warmed to more than the guys).

This is another potentially fun but risky items on the wish list. Open-slather trading would be a debacle, would defeat the point of drafting, and skew events further towards the experienced players.

I can see how trading adds an additional dimension to the game, tests another set of skills, and could create some fun moments. It would require careful design to avoid the practical pitfalls outlined above.

Archetypes

This is obviously a core component of Cube drafting. However, when reading other Cube articles and lists there seemed to be an emphasis of general archetypes (with “control” being stronger than aggro/weenie or any particular combination). Some Cube authors pay little attention to archetypes and more on colour (and CC) symmetry. Others, quite fairly, point out the “if you build it, they will come” philosophy. That is, Magic players will adapt to any environment: if you “objectively” determine the X most powerful cards in each colour, then put those into a Cube, players will move towards an equilibrium.

The stronger strategies will be identified and, over time, drafters will gravitate towards these. Thus, the symmetry in the Cube (or, for that matter, CMC or power level) becomes immaterial when your playgroup knows the content of the Cube. Players will identify viable archetypes regardless, and the primary purpose of colour-symmetry becomes one of trust between designer and players. Trust is a fundamental concept that I intend to discuss in detail in a later article.

One popular Cube designer identifies the “Major” Archetypes (from the MTG Salvation cube thread) as being:

• R/B Aggro
• Reanimator
• The Rock
• Counterburn
• U/B Control
• White Weenie
• W/B Control
• Manaramp
• Five Color Control
• Boros Deck Wins

As a twist on this, I made a decision to depart from the norm. I want a mix of interesting, and long-forgotten archetypes to form a part of the Cube. I want rebels, changelings, goblins, affinity, poison (this article is penned pre-Scars though), cascade, morph, snow, dredge and other small parts of Magic to have both meaning and viability. I want the little guys (er.. I mean the underdone mechanics of Magic, not Figure of Destiny and friends) to count for something!

In all honesty, I had no idea whether the nostalgia aspect would be embraced or rejected by the target groups. I imagined a future where experienced players exploit a 15th pick Amrou Scout, Stinkweed Imp or Goblin Warchief. That said, some nostalgic picks can’t be saved: I think good old Dakkon Blackblade will have to stay at home.

Making basics count for something

When we started, we thought blue was the strongest colour. Not because it had Time Walk and Ancestral Recall (to date, I’ve never seen them). No, it was because we only had a half-dozen or so Islands (oh, and to Richard Garfield, the man who thought it was a great idea to put Islands in a rare slot : YOU OWE ME SIX 1995 DOLLARS ).

When you first begin to play, basic lands matter. I want to somehow incorporate this in the design, along with solving one of my pet peeves with ante (where your opponent antes a land against your Spirit of the Night).

This is on my list of design goals because I think it can create more challenges to the players. As a restriction, it can be subtle (how would you value a card costed at WW if you have only ten plains in your deck?), and it allows more non-basic lands to be put into the draft pool. In all honesty, everyone might hate this.

Onwards…
Join me for part two, when I will discuss how real-world restrictions can sometime stifle your fun.

- Simon Walker

Special thanks to Simon for this piece! If you want to contribute to cubedrafting.com, here’s how! -Thea

Note: This was a Winston draft, so it’s a little different to describe what is going on. I’ll do my best, but let me know if something isn’t clear.

Also, I am drafting here with my cube, which is similar but not identical to Evan’s.

Drafting

I win the die roll and choose to pick second (since this means I might see more cards, and might get early signals). Justin passes the first pile, so I see two cards in my first pick:

I’m happy to take this pile. A Mox will always make it into my deck, and I like getting into red with the knowledge that Justin doesn’t intend to be there. Pillage is going to be best in an aggressive deck, and RW is my favorite aggro color combination, so right off the bat I’m leaning towards that.

Justin passes the first pile again, so for my next pick I see:

At the point, I’m very happy to be in RW, and this pile will be playable if I end up aggro (my goal) or more midrange.

The next time around, I see

which is clearly nowhere I want to be. I look at the next pile and see

so I’m moving on again. In the last pile, I see

which freaks me out a bit, but I reason that if I push Justin into UB control, that’s a pretty good matchup for my theoretical RW deck. I pick

off the top. Nothing I want to play, but I don’t want to face it either.

In my next pass, I see

I’m totally psyched about this. Nobilis is the perfect high end for the deck I want to draft. For my next pick, I take

My deck isn’t shaping up to be super fast, but I’m happy with what I’ve got so far, and I haven’t passed anything I’m too afraid of. On my next turn, I see

which I clearly let go, and then

Again, nothing I’m looking for. In the last pile there is:

I pick off the top and get

I haven’t seen anything that I want to Portal yet, but maybe I’ll get lucky and find a Reveillark.

On the next pass, I get

in the first pile. That’s awesome- Adamaro can be a huge problem for control decks, and I’m currently putting Justin on blue, mostly because I’m not there. I take

next. That’s good- I’m lucky that the right fixing is showing up in this card pool. My deck feels underpowered to me thus far, but I don’t think I’m being cut off, and I’m not scared of the power level in other colors. After this pick, though, I think Justin is more likely to be in black than blue.

My next time through, I see

which I pass, and then immediately regret. It’s not a card I want to face, and I think Justin will play it. The next pile has

… nothing for me there, and the final pile has

Boo.

I pick Serra Avenger off the top- a gift. After that pick, though, I start to worry that my deck isn’t going to come together. Maybe the pieces I’m looking for – early creatures and token makers- aren’t even in the card pool. The next pick doesn’t make me feel any better. I see

and pass it, and then see

I’m scared of Monolith (what if Justin’s black deck involves Decree of Pain or Profane Command, or he ends up switching to UB with the Oona he picked up?), so I take the pile.

My next pick is no better. I see and pass

then

and then

taking Thawing Glaciers off the top. Yikes. I take

first on my next pick, as it might be worthwhile if my deck doesn’t end up they way I want. On my next pick, the green keeps flowing- I see

then

and then

and take

off the top. On theme!

After that, I see

Not where I want to be at all.

Next is Garruk- crap! – but I reason that I can pass it, since Justin will take the first pile if he is in green. After that, I flip over

a white card, but not a creature or burn or anything I’m particularly looking for after my last few lackluster picks. I take

Firespout

off the top,

which I’m happy to have, especially since i have a Temple Garden in my pile. Next, I pass

then

The next pile contains

I’m happy to take it this time- two playables seem better than a random card.

On my next pass, I leave

and then take

He’s a good dude for the more midrange deck I now think I will be building. On my next turn, I pass over

and then take

Next, Nevinyrral’s Disk and Engineered Explosives have been added to Qasali Pridemage, but it’s still not for me.

I take Pianna, which isn’t optimal for me but might be ok.

Things start to look up with

and then

after passing

The next time through I decide to take the first pile, since Eternal Dragon has been added. He can fix my mana early, and come back if the game goes long, and I’d like to have a way to fetch my Temple Garden if I run it.

I see Relic and Unmake next. Unmake is a stretch manawise, but awesome removal- I think it’s worth the pick.

The next time through, I go the whole way down the line, passing

then

and finally

before being rewarded with

off the top.

Next I get Jitte in the first pile,

and then

Talk about a series of picks that did a lot for my deck.

After passing the whole row…

and then

…I end up getting Genesis off the top.

The pick after that is Time Walk, which I don’t think I will be splashing but I also don’t want to pass.

My last pick nets me

Deckbuilding

This draft started out pretty rough – I assume you believe I’m not cherry-picking this now! – but it shaped up a bit towards the end. Here’s what I built:

Adamaro, First to Desire
Eternal Dragon
Giant Solifuge
Guardian of the Guildpact
Hellspark Elemental
Kor Skyfisher
Nobilis of War
Pianna, Nomad Captain
Serra Avenger
Skizzik
Student of Warfare
Yosei, the Morning Star

Banefire
Martial Coup
Pillage
Rolling Thunder

Crib Swap
Return to Dust
Sudden Shock
Unmake

Black Lotus
Crystal Ball
Mox Pearl
Umezawa’s Jitte

Plateau
Thawing Glacier
9 Plains
6 Mountain

My deck certainly isn’t the dreamiest, but it has some potentially quick draws and doesn’t just lose in the mid-to-late game. Jitte doesn’t hurt, either. It’s also not the best Nobilis deck, since it lacks token makers, but the haste guys are pretty synergistic as well.

As I learn after our first game, Justin is running a midrange BG deck, splashing red for Blazing Specter and Void. He has a ton of removal and token-makers to go along with Creakwood Liege.

Games

Game 1: I have a pretty sweet start with turn 1 Skyfisher off a Mox, and turn 2 Hellspark. I follow up with Adamaro, while Justin has Twinblade Slasher and man lands. I get him down to six, but I’m dead drawing and my hand is Martial Coup and lands. Justin plays Void for two, getting my Skyfisher and Martial Coup. I keep drawing lands, and die to Deranged Hermit and Raging Ravine.

Game 2: I mulligan once into a slow hand with two lands, Pianna, and Jitte. I find Eternal Dragon a few draws in to get my third land, but we trade removal and I don’t get to equip the Jitte. Justin plays void again, this time getting Rolling Thunder and the Jitte. The decisive turn comes when Justin plays Blazing Specter while I have two mana up, forcing me to discard Crib Swap. That leaves the way clear for Ink-Eyes, who grabs Eternal Dragon and takes the game.

After this game, I boarded out Eternal Dragon and a Plains for Temple Garden and Firespout. I don’t really need to have green since his creatures are mostly on the ground, but it can’t hurt to have the possibility of Firespouting both ways.

Game 3: I have turn one Student of Warfare into turn two Hellspark. Justin is stuck on lands, and find Pillage. Giant Solifuge seals the deal.

Game 4: I start with Student again, and this time follow it up with Skizzik. I barely win this one due to damage from Justin’s Phyrexian Arena and my own Rolling Thunder and Banefire.

Game 5: Solifuge takes this one down singlehandedly. Justin has plenty of removal but it almost all targets, and every time he plays a creature I manage to remove it.

Game 6: I have Lotus into turn two Nobilis this game, which quickly dies to Terror. I follow up with Serra Avenger, and Justin has Phyrexian Arena. I play out a Guardian of the Guildpact, which holds off Twinblade Slasher. I attack in since I’m ahead of life and can race, but Justin has Ink-Eyes for my Nobilis on the next turn. Whoops. I rip a Martial Coup, but it’s not good enough as Justin’s follow up Gleancrawler wins the game.

Game 7: Unfortunately, our final game is pretty anticlimatic- I have Student and Hellspark again (how many of those am I running?) and finish it with a Banefire.

My draws were pretty good in this game, but I also attribute my wins to Crystal Ball, which I cleverly didn’t mention in my game recaps, but which definitely showed up and helped me dig for burn in a couple of games. I was pretty surprised by how good it was- I love the card, but I thought it was going to be too slow to be excellent in my deck.

I also wanted to mention my decision to not splash for Time Walk. I usually would advocate splashing a card of that caliber in almost any deck, but I didn’t have any fixing or dual lands, and I was worried that a lone Island could really mess up my already intense color requirements.

It was definitely pretty fun to have a draft where the powerful equipment- Jitte and Sword of Vengeance- didn’t dominate. A few of the games were repetitive, but towards the beginning of the series we had some really fun, swingy games.

Let me know what you think about posts like this in the comments! One thing I would definitely do differently in the future, if I do another draft walkthough, is to keep track of more details from the games. If the Winston draft format doesn’t translate well, I could also do this only when I do a normal draft. Other suggestions or comments? Please let me know!

The Cube is a strange format at times. Sometimes you get beaten by a turn one Library of Alexandria or a well-timed Mana Drain, and there’s not much to say there. The best cards in the cube are really, really broken. Other times, though, you end up staring across the board at a card you didn’t quite appreciate. In this article, I want to talk about the cube cards that seem unassuming, but can dominate the game. I chose cards that weren’t highly ranked on the MTG Salvation cube forum, and that I see excluded from many lists. Let’s go!

Brigid, Hero of Kinsbaile

People often look at my cube list and declare that Bridgid is underpowered. I usually look at suggestions pretty carefully, but that’s one case where I just don’t. Bridgid has singlehandedly won more games than I can count. She’s an absolute madman against token strategies and, you know, Kira, Great Glass-Spinner. Nothing with less than five toughness can even swing in with an active Brigid sitting back to block. She makes combat a mess for your opponent, and if you need it- she can make a Cloudgoat Ranger fly.

Ith, High Arcanist

I see a lot of cubes that seem to struggle to find good stuff for the U/W slots, and for some reason, Ith gets no love. He really, really should. He’s Maze of Ith, but doesn’t cost a land drop, on a pretty much huge body that you paid two mana for. He complements UW strategies in a ridiculous way- he’s a wall that forces them to overextend into Wrath of God while stopping scary combat effects like Ashling, the Extinguisher or Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni and he can attack in the meantime. What more do you want?

Spitemare

I get the problem with Spitemare- there are a ton of good cards in WR multicolor like Ajani Vengeant, Lightning Helix, and Brion Stoutarm. But if you divide multicolor and hybrid, as I do, Spitemare definitely deserves a spot.

Aside: The reason it’s a good idea to include hybrid and multicolor separately is that they really accomplish different things. Multicolor rewards you with strong cards, at the price of a more tenuous manabase. Hybrid actually works the way Shadowmoor/Eventide were supposed to- it encourages monocolor decks. And often the effects you get from those hybrid cards are completely unfair in one color or both. Take Dominus of Fealty, for example. Why can blue give a borrowed creature haste? In monoblack, Unmake is hands-down the best removal you can have. Without a doubt, the best monocolor decks that have been built with my cube have used hybrid cards heavily, and I highly recommend including a fair amount of hybrid if you really want to push monocolor in you cube.

But back to Spitemare. There is a card that absolutely locks down the board when she comes down. She makes combat hugely problematic for your opponent, and in general she is going to either be a two-for-one if she dies in combat, or demand a quality piece of removal (like Swords to Plowshares or Terror) that your opponent might have rather saved for a bigger threat. If you’re playing her in a red deck, you probably also have mass damage effects like Earthquake or Pyroclasm, and just like Stuffy Doll, Spitemare multiplies those in a terrifying way. I’ve been impressed every time I’ve played with her, or against her.

Guardian of the Guildpact

This unassuming creature is a perfect example of the kind of card that turns out to be great in the cube, once you remember him. He’s not a constructed all-star or “best creature ever”, but he fits into any white deck and does a good job of it. In control decks, he infini-blocks to help you stabilize. In aggro decks, he’s nearly unblockable and ridiculous with any kind of buff. In a way, he’s a little bit of a hack- undoubtedly better in the cube than in his limited environment. There’s a lesson there- when you find other cards like that, with awesome abilities that are somewhat less good in their block, they can be really outstanding in another setting.

Diabolic Servitude

This is one that really baffles me- I’m not sure how Diabolic Servitude isn’t an auto-include. Seriously guys- it’s repeatable recursion. You can use it more than once! I… don’t even know what else to say. I absolutely think it’s a more relevant include than slow removal like Consuming Vapors, or one-time reanimation like Makeshift Mannequin.

Attrition

Attrition is another one that I advocate on the grounds of it basically dominating the game nearly every time it shows up. True, it’s not as effective when your opponent is playing black or has creatures with shroud. In nearly every case, though, it means that you are constantly trading your worst dude for their best. Get a token maker in that deck- Bitterblossom comes to mind- and you are golden. Furthermore, there are a few other broken things to do, as with any sac effect- Squee, Goblin Nabob, Bloodghast, Adarkar Valkyrie and persist creatures are all silly.

Shaper Parasite

Shaper Parasite is on my list because his effect is so unusual for blue. Sort of like a Psionic Blast- totally out of color and thus totally welcome in the cube. Sometimes he’s just sniping a pesky Nezumi Shortfang or Mother of Runes, but because his effect is on a body, he can also trade with a bigger creature as well. Win-win! I’m always happy to have this guy in my deck.

Squirrel Nest

Squirrel Nest is my favorite type of card for the cube. It’s always playable- it doesn’t have to be part of a combo to be good. But when it is, it’s absolutely busted. Opposition/Squirrel Nest is the ultimate, but Attrition works too. Beyond those two, there are tons of effects that work well with Squirrel Nest- green Lieges, Deranged Hermit, Greater Gargadon, Garruk Wildspeaker (two ways!), both Sarkhan the Mad AND Sarkhan Vol… and I’m confident that your cube includes many others.

Erratic Portal

Sorry, other cards on this last- I saved my favorite for last. Erratic Portal is a card, like Squirrel Nest, that has a straightforward purpose that is Just Fine- namely, to slow your opponent down and save your dudes from removal if need be. Obviously though, the goal is not be fair at all. Instead, I want to put Erratic Portal in a deck with Reveillark, Mulldrifter, Siege-Gang Commander, Broodmate Dragon, or basically any other good creature ever. Seriously, how long would this list be? It’s also part of an infinite turns combo with Time Walk and Eternal Witness…. and basically an infinite anything combo with Eternal Witness, actually. If you want to be a jerk, and I do, blend with Avalanche Riders and Karmic Guide.

In my opinion, this is the best part of having a cube- the part where you try out a new card, and realize that you can no longer live without it. What’s your favorite unsung cube hero?

- Thea Steele

Special thanks to Thea for letting me publish this piece here. It was originally featured on her cube blog Masked Admirers. If you want to contribute to cubedrafting.com, here’s how! -Evan

Check out the complete cube audit.

On his website about the format, Tom LaPille said this about cube drafting: “Go make a cube, or at least convince someone else to. That cube will enhance your life and the lives of everyone else it touches.” This may be the most true statement about the format by far, as it has been the most fun that I’ve ever had playing Magic: The Gathering. Many articles and webpages like this very site, Cubedrafting.com, Tom LaPille’s site and cube list, various articles on StarCityGames.com and a few articles on MTGsalvation and TCGplayer have been created to enlighten the world about the greatest Magic: The Gathering format that has never been sanctioned: cube drafting.

When people think of cube drafting, they think of cards such as Black Lotus, Balance, Future Sight, Mind Twist, Flametongue Kavu, Tarmogoyf and Desolation Angel and if I had to wager, I’d say about 200 cards or so (most of which are covered in MTGSalvation’s “Official Cube Power Rankings” thread compiled by MTGSalvation forum member Silent Edge) can be considered the primary tier of what should be in a cube. But what about the others? What shouldn’t be in a cube?

This article will help with this oft-neglected aspect of cube design, by helping you discover what should and shouldn’t be in the “2nd tier” of cube cards. Cards like Sorrow’s Path and Dwarven Song are obviously suboptimal cards? Most of the suboptimal cards in peoples’ cubes however, aren’t that obvious. These “2nd tier” cards will comprise the bulk of the colors’ cards and kinds of decks that the colors can create and will ultimately determine how your cube plays and performs as a set.

After all, the goal of cube design isn’t to simply throw a bunch of good cards into a box, shuffle them up and draft them. Your goal as a cube designer to build an extremely powerful, unique, fun and well-balanced Magic: The Gathering set to booster draft, which happens to feature the most powerful cards of all time.

I’ll be referencing my own cube list as well as a commons cube list that my friend, makenfunny, created.

I’ll start with a story from when I drafted with the aforementioned commons cube. His cube had only been drafted about 5 times by me and some other people, so we decided to draft it at a 24-hour restaurant to give my friend some more data.

At some point my wg aggro build got paired against a blue control deck. I couldn’t deal enough damage in “Phase 1” and eventually got Capsize locked out of the game.

Capsize my dude EOT? Again? Sooo fun.

Bored and sitting there with a cup of coffee and with a handful of now useless cards, I pondered how aggro decks performed in his cube and remembered that they’ve not performed well, as control decks like Grixis Control typically ended up doing much better than aggro decks.

This caused me to turn to my friend and ask him “Has anyone ever drafted aggro in this cube and won?” (in terms of a winning record, not just a single game.) I don’t remember his response, but he didn’t disagree with my rather long-worded claim that aggro was weak in his cube. This conversation, along with some good design on his part, has helped aggro become a much better and healthily draftable archetype leading to a more balanced cube “metagame” and a much more fun environment (and in my opinion, become the best commons cube that I’ve seen.)

While aggro can be drafted in cubes that don’t explicitly support it and can win all of their matches, it is much more the exception than the rule. Let’s look at the Magic 2010 limited environment to underscore this point. Despite the inclusion of a few quality common aggro cards in M10 like Nessian Courser, Stormfront Pegasus and Trumpet Blast, aggro strategies are unlikely to succeed in M10 limited for several reasons:

* Firstly, although aggressive creatures and cards exist in the format, there are not nearly enough to provide the archetype with its required critical mass of support.

* Secondly, there are also several common creatures like Horned Turtle and Griffin Sentinel which can stymie the efforts of an aggressive start, giving midrange and aggressive decks time to stabilize and win in Phases 2 and 3.

* Thirdly, there aren’t enough disruptive cards like Molten Rain to punish midrange and control decks, making them lose tempo and preventing them from getting into Phases 2 and 3 of the game that their decks are tailored to thrive in.

* Finally, it is difficult for aggro decks to be able to “seal the deal” and win the game. Reach is hard to come by for M10 decks because there are no common pieces of equipment in M10 and what reach is available is in small amounts through cards like Lava Axe and Lightning Bolt (the latter of which will be picked very early).

Aggro decks rely on consistency, redundancy and efficient use of their mana on each turn to achieve their goal of winning the game as soon as possible. The main crux of this article is to say that while many of the above components are used in cubes, they aren’t used enough and fail to provide the necessary support through the required redundancy.

The first step is to provide aggro decks with a critical mass of cheap and efficient creatures, so that the aggro drafter can consistently deal damage quickly to win.

2-powered 1 drops have been an essential element of aggro decks since Magic’s beginnings, as they are one of the most cost-efficient sources of damage in the game. While cubes that do not support aggro include some of these powerhouse creatures, like Isamaru, Hound of Konda, these cubes do not provide them with enough support through other powerful aggro cards, therefore denying them the required consistency and redundancy to help them succeed.

Unfortunately, many cube designers perceive aggressive creatures like Jackal Pup to be weak for 2 reasons: Firstly, these cards don’t fit into control decks that care about a strong Phases 2 and 3, because drawing a one drop creature on turn 6+ is just useless or at least suboptimal for those decks. (Aggro decks, on the other hand, want to draw as many of those in the early game to keep on the pressure, even if they lose significance as the game progresses.) Secondly, these cube designers do not use these cards because they typically overstate the drawbacks on these cards.

Let’s discuss the first reason by distinguishing the difference between universally playable cards, aggro cards and control cards.

Most cube cards are universally playable in the sense that they can be used in almost any deck of the appropriate color and sometimes are splashed. These are cards like Flametongue Kavu and Magma Jet, cards that are equally at home in aggressive decks and control decks. Due to their flexibility and power, these cards should comprise a majority of a cube’s contents.

Control cards and aggro cards are cards that are mainly played in their corresponding archetypes. Aggro cards include cards like Grafted Wargear and Savannah Lions, whereas control cards include cards like Akroma’s Vengeance and Eternal Dragon. To show how their distinction and use in detail, let’s examine two decks with regards to Goblin Guide, an aggro card in Shards of Alara/M10/Zendikar-era Standard.

The first is the Blue-Red-White control deck that Luis Scott-Vargas used to win the Los Angeles Star City Games 5K event in January, 2010.

Deck
Spells [27]
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Path To Exile
4 Spreading Seas
4 Flashfreeze
2 Jace Beleren
2 Double Negative
2 Divination
3 Ajani Vengeant
2 Earthquake
2 Mind Spring
Creatures [7]
4 Wall Of Denial
3 Sphinx Of Jwar Isle
Lands [26]
4 Island
2 Mountain
4 Plains
4 Arid Mesa
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Sejiri Refuge
Sideboard [15]
4 Baneslayer Angel
3 Luminarch Ascension
2 Mind Control
1 Oblivion Ring
1 Cancel
2 Essence Scatter
2 Negate

Let’s say that someone got a foil Goblin Guide and decided to change LSV’s deck by taking out a card to put in the Goblin Guide (for the sake of argument, we’ll assume that metagames are a non-factor, since cards like Spreading Seas preyed on a format where blue wasn’t played much.) You’d say that no matter what card is removed, using Goblin Guide in LSV’s deck is a bad idea. Why?

Goblin Guide doesn’t fit the themes of LSV’s deck. LSV’s deck uses creatures with shroud, spot and mass removal, mana denial, countermagic and card advantage to win a long game. Goblin Guide clashes with these themes because it adds nothing to any of these themes and clashes with the deck, like putting a scoop of vanilla ice cream on a slice of pizza. Therefore, Goblin Guide is a bad card in this particular deck.

The next deck is a Boros Bushwhacker deck, played by Fabian Lucero to a 1st place finish at the Open Summer 2010 Cash event in Chile:

Deck
Creatures [26]
4 Elite Vanguard
3 Goblin Bushwhacker
4 Goblin Guide
4 Kor Skyfisher
4 Plated Geopede
3 Ranger of Eos
4 Steppe Lynx
Instant [11]
4 Burst Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Path to Exile
Land [23]
4 Arid Mesa
4 Marsh Flats
5 Mountain
5 Plains
4 Scalding Tarn
1 Swamp
Sideboard: [15]
4 Goblin Ruinblaster
4 Celestial Purge
4 Unstable Footing
3 Slave of Bolas

4 Goblin Guides are played in Lucero’s deck successfully, because it doesn’t clash with the deck’s themes, it supplement them, namely the theme of dealing damage to an opponent with lots of cheap and efficient creatures (as Lucero’s deck not only runs Goblin Guide, but also Steppe Lynx, Elite Vanguard, Plated Geopede, Goblin Bushwhacker and Kor Skyfisher to provide Goblin Guide support).

Looking at both of these decks, we can conclude that just because LSV’s rwu control deck can’t use Goblin Guide effectively, that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad card, it’s just not the right card for LSV’s deck. It’s a phenomenal card in Lucero’s rw Boros Bushwhacker deck due to the support that Lucero’s deck provides for the goblin. No matter how efficient a creature like Goblin Guide is, it can’t kill the opponent by itself, barring an extremely bad hand kept by the opponent. Similarly, Lucero’s rw Boros Bushwhacker deck is unable to use Luminarch Ascension effectively because it doesn’t supplement the aggressive themes of Lucero’s deck of killing an opponent ASAP, even if the angels created by the quest are cheap.

Although it may seem self-evident that aggro cards often aren’t very good in control decks and vice versa, the point is that restrictive cards that only fit into aggro or control strategies aren’t necessarily bad, but that they require support through other cards.

Therefore, a cube with Isamaru, Hound of Konda as its only white 1 drop will have a “weaker” Isamaru than a cube that has Isamaru, Student of Warfare, Elite Vanguard, Savannah Lions and Steppe Lynx due to the lack of support. The sole inclusion of Isamaru in a cube doesn’t mean that the cube in question is conducive for white aggro (although it’s a good start) as it lacks the critical mass of support for Isamaru.

Many strong cards have an added drawback (a common one is somehow dealing damage to its owner) to compensate for having a undercosted effect or above average power/toughness. Many cube designers do not use these cards because they typically overstate the significance of the drawbacks on these cards (for example, thinking that Wild Dogs is a bad card because it may defect to an opponent and that Jackal Pup is bad because it damages its controller). This can’t be further from the truth! While creatures like these obviously have drawbacks, their drawbacks in aggro decks are usually not enough to make the cards unworthy of being deemed powerful cards.

Drawback? What Drawback?

For example, in the case of Jackal Pup, for the most part, the only time that you will take damage from a Jackal Pup is when it dies from either a burn spell or combat damage. Taking 2 damage from trading with a Venser, Shaper Savant is an insignificant drawback, especially since the Pup has dealt 4-6 damage to a player on its own. Similarly, cards like Wild Dogs ask the caster to be at a higher life total than an opponent, which a good aggro deck should be doing anyway (and while the opponent can cast a lightning bolt on the dogs’ caster, this scenario is not common and is a scenario that I haven’t personally seen happen).

The overstating the significance of drawbacks is similar to when new cards are revealed and people look for the absolute worst scenario for a card, dismissing a card. Some people dismissed Path to Exile at first because it let your opponent put a land into play and could potentially help an opponent out of land/manascrew. As time has proven, Path to Exile‘s drawback and scenarios when it could result in its caster being blown out proved to be nowhere near as much as people had feared and Path to Exile was given more respect and is rightfully ubiquitous in white decks.

Of course, not all 2/X creatures for 1 mana are worth using, as creatures like Accursed Centaur and Scythe Tiger are creatures with extremely significant and prohibitive drawbacks. After all, I’m not advocating using inferior aggressive cards over good control cards. I’m advocating the opposite.

“What about the other creatures?” After all, 1 drop creatures aren’t the only creatures that aggressive decks use, since that’d make for an abysmal curve. Aggro decks (cube aggro decks being no exception) also rely on efficient aggressive creatures that are 3 mana or less, like Keldon Marauders or Soltari Champion to form the backbone of their creature base, so that they can deal a lot of combat damage to an opponent quickly. We can enable aggro decks to thrive by providing a critical mass of creatures in this mana range.

Each aggro color needs to devote about 1/5th of its total slots to aggressive one and two drop creatures. In other words, if you have 60 cards in each color, and want to support aggro in black, white, red and green (blue, for the most part, doesn’t support aggro well due to the fact that its 1 drop creatures as well as its 2 drop creatures are, for the most part, not very efficient attackers), 12 of the creatures in those colors need to be cost 1 or 2 mana, focusing more on creatures like Bloodghast, than cheap universally playable ones like Knight of Meadowgrain, Mother of Runes and Sakura-Tribe Elder because they’re still very good in aggro decks. Using this critical mass helps aggressive decks achieve their needed support through redundancy to win through creature combat.

For an example of how this applies in a color section, look at Tom LaPille’s white creature section in his posted cube list as of 2007. Tom included many white efficient 2 drop creatures, like Soltari Priest, as well as the best white 1 drop creatures available (Steppe Lynx, Student of Warfare and Elite Vanguard did not exist when he last edited his public cube list) to ensure that aggressive strategies in his cube were viable through providing white aggro decks with the necessary critical mass of early creatures to build their decks.

Further, look at the sample RW cube decklist that Tom LaPille posted on his site as a showcasing of what a cube deck looks like.
Deck

1 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
1 Mother of Runes
1 Savannah Lions
1 Jackal Pup
1 Mogg Fanatic
1 Grim Lavamancer

1 Silver Knight
1 White Knight
1 Soltari Monk
1 Soltari Priest
1 Whipcorder
1 Goblin Legionnaire

1 Paladin en-Vec

1 Calciderm

1 Firebolt
1 Rift Bolt

1 Incinerate
1 Sudden Shock
1 Lightning Helix
1 Volcanic Hammer
1 Magma Jet
1 Demonfire
1 Fireball
1 Ravages of War
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 Windswept Heath
1 Flooded Strand
1 Plateau
1 Sacred Foundry
1 City of Brass
1 Gemstone Mine
2 Mountain
7 Plains

Note the 6 1-drops and the 6 2-drops in the deck. If Tom didn’t provide a critical mass for early creatures like he and I use in our cubes, decks like these wouldn’t be possible and the draftability of good aggro decks would suffer.

I’ll sum up the critical mass of cheap and efficient creatures discussion using a up with a recent discussion: I was asked a few weeks ago why I’m running a bad card like Jackal Pup if I’m already using the superior Goblin Guide in my cube. The reasons are because Jackal Pup being a cheap and efficient creature with an overstated drawback and that Jackal Pup helps me provide aggro decks with support through a critical mass of cheap efficient creatures. These reasons are why Jackal Pup‘s in my cube and always will be and that a cube that doesn’t use Jackal Pup represents incorrect design.

Disruption

Much like how many cubes will only run creatures like Isamaru, Hound of Konda for aggro creatures, these same cubes will similarly only include cards like Avalanche Riders, Strip Mine, Wasteland and Rishadan Port for mana denial cards as a means of gaining tempo and hosing non-basic lands.

For example, casting a turn 3 Molten Rain without applying any kind of pressure would be much less effective tempo-gaining play than casting a turn 3 Molten Rain with a Wild Dogs and a Tarmogoyf on your side of the battlefield, since not only are you holding back your opponent’s mana development and keeping the opponent in “Phase 1” longer, but you’re also capitalizing on the gained tempo with your creatures. This isn’t a fringe strategy either, the plan of using land denial to gain tempo and to hose non-basic lands has been used in various ways: in sideboards of decks like Boros Bushwhacker by using Goblin Ruinblaster, in Extended Zoo decks such as these that use Molten Rain to deal damage and gain tempo and in Vintage Aggro MUD and Aggro Stax decks use Smokestack and Tangle Wire.

The main thing about disruptive cards like these is that these are cards that make people want to draft aggro. When someone opens cube a pack, for example, they look for the best card or at least something to build around: Recurring Nightmare makes a player want to draft a black reanimation deck or a deck that abuses “enter the battlefield” triggers on creatures, whereas Isamaru, as good as it is, doesn’t make someone necessarily want to draft a white aggro deck.

Disruptive cards like Armageddon, Nether Void, Plow Under and Winter Orb are the kinds of cards that make people want to draft aggro decks, as can be seen by LaPille’s sample rw deck and the white-centered aggro archetype discussions on this site, but as I’ve discussed, cards like these should not be the sole representatives of disruption.

Other means of disruption include discard spells and gaining tempo by destroying artifact based mana accelerants like Moxen, Signets and Sol Ring (although tt is, however, harder to rely on this strategy with regards to tempo since not every deck is going to have a Mox or a Signet, especially if the cube is unpowered). For the most part, these are generally included in pretty decent amounts in many cubes, but I think more need to be used through cards like Duress (which still has plenty of juicy discard targets in a cube and is definitely worthy of inclusion in a cube even if the cube has Thoughtseize.) Creatures with disruptive abilities which that trigger when they enter the battlefield (Viridian Shaman, Kor Sanctifiers, Shriekmaw) tend to stronger due to their inherent card advantage generally be easier inclusions in decks than their spell counterparts, but their non-creature counterparts are definitely cubeworthy as well.

There is the argument that cards like these are “unfun” cards to play against, but I personally don’t agree with this argument for several reasons. Cards like these aren’t “unfun” because they encourage a more balanced cube “metagame” where control isn’t overbearingly powerful as the only game in town and disruptive cards like these are as important to aggro decks as cards like Wrath of God are important to midrange and control decks. Besides, one could argue that it equally isn’t “fun” to have your board wrathed, and it isn’t “fun” to be unable to beat a control player because they’ve stabilized behind a Capsize and counterspell wall. The concept of “fun” is very subjective and not including cards solely based on what someone may perceive as fun or unfun is detrimental to the overall health and balance of a cube.

Is Wrath more fun to play against than Armageddon?

Reach

When I was discussing the use of aggro cards in a cube with a friend, he said that Wild Dogs wasn’t good because of the aforementioned “it can switch sides” argument and also because it can’t kill something like an Elvish Warrior (or, for a more relevant cube example, a Kor Skyfisher or a Knight of Meadowgrain / Black Knight.) On its own, Wild Dogs can’t kill one of these creatures. However, if you look at the above rw decks (and pretend for the sake of argument that Wild Dogs somehow became a red or white creature,) you’ll find that neither of these decks would be shut down by a White Knight, after all, if that was the case, the White Knight and Black Knight tag-team would have forced Boros Bushwhacker and pretty much every Standard aggressive deck out of the format. Why would a deck like Lucero’s or LaPille’s rw cube deck be not scared of a Knight? Reach.

When many people think of reach in aggro decks, they tend to think of direct damage. While this certainly is a component, it does not encompass all of what reach is.

Reach is also used either to increase the significance of your creatures,and while Sword of Fire and Ice and Sword of Light and Shadow are extremely strong cards that are auto-includes in cubes that can run them, much like with land denial and with aggro creatures, a common mistake is eschewing the other quality reach cards, like Bonesplitter, Glorious Anthem and Grafted Wargear. While cards like these are not as windmill-slammingly awesome as cards like the Mirrodin Swords, Umezawa’s Jitte and Skullclamp, they’re excellent cards whose inclusions shouldn’t be overlooked in cube, because much like the “1st Tier” equipment, they increase the damage potential of creatures. A turn 2 knight followed by a turn 4 or 5 Grafted Wargear is scary enough, but a turn 3 Wargear is even scarier and can end games quickly.

With regards to the direct damage aspect of reach, another common mistake in cube design is that red typically doesn’t have enough direct damage in its arsenal. MTGSalvation forum member and cube enthusiast wtwlf123 proposed the idea that in red, half of the red section’s cards should be able to deal damage to an opponent without attacking. This enables aggressive decks to finish off an opponent who has stabilized with removal for your creatures or who has controls bigger creatures like Yosei, the Morning Star and Kokusho, the Evening Star. In many aggro decks, your aggressive creatures will deal damage in the early stages of the game to “soften up” an opponent through dealing early damage, using direct damage to finish an opponent off (although direct damage tends to also really good at destroying creatures.) Much like how it’s difficult for aggressive decks to thrive without proper support, it’s difficult for red aggressive decks to thrive without a good chunk of its arsenal being able to dome an opponent for his or her last few remaining points of life. This allows red to play into one of its major strengths and in cube, like in all Magic: The Gathering formats, each color should play into its major strengths.

Repeatable burn is an especially excellent tool for red aggro decks to win. Much like Jackal Pup, cards like Sulfuric Vortex and Stormbind are sometimes deemed bad cards due to their drawbacks, which also cannot be further from the truth. While cards like Sulfuric Vortex and Stormbind can have their drawbacks be detrimental towards you, their drawbacks (causing you damage, making you discard cards) are typically overstated because, for the most part, they won’t matter as they’ll be finishing the job that aggro creatures in an aggro deck started as being at 6 life against an active Vortex or Stormbind is quite scary.

Again, looking at the sample RW cube deck that Tom LaPille made and the Boros Bushwhacker deck, you’ll see that both use a significant amount of red direct damage spells to not only clear a path for their attacking aggro hordes, but to also finish off a weakened opponent. Without a significant portion of red spells being able to deal damage to an opponent, decks like these would be weaker. In my cube’s 55-card red section, 28 of the cards can deal damage to an opponent without attacking. Increasing the amount of red burn to the amount that I presently have has helped aggro decks in my cube finish off weakened opponents.

Aside from burn and the 1/5 cheap creature ratio, you’re probably wondering how much support is needed to make sure that aggressive strategies are a healthily viable archetype. Unfortunately, it’s hard to quantify these concepts and a lot of this really depends on the individual contents of the cube, its size and even the people who draft it. One method that I’ve found to be a good method of evaluation is just observing how aggro decks perform. In other words, it doesn’t matter as much if people can draft aggro decks if aggro decks can’t consistently win because as mentioned at the beginning of the article, aggro can win in cubes that do not provide it without support, it just won’t happen very often and only if the right pieces fall into place.

Mana curves and too many expensive cards.

Another common mistake in cube design that usually leads to the predominance of midrange and control strategies and the failure of aggro strategies is including too many expensive cards. One of the best ways to “trim the fat” of a cube is to monitor a cube’s curve and average mana cost per color.

Many cubes tend to have too many cards in the middle to higher mana range because these cards seem more impressive and because much like gold cards, they are overwhelmingly fun, but that doesn’t mean that they should be represented as heavily in your cube. Dragons are fun, but making the entire color red comprised of 75% dragons and 25% fireball effects would make red an absolutely unplayable color.

The mana curve process involves not only placing cards according to their mana cost, but according to their actual mana cost to accurately reflect their true mana cost by including cards at the casting costs where they’re mostly cast. For example, I have Force of Will as a 0 mana blue spell because it’s almost always cast by pitching a blue card and paying 1 life, when I used to use Spitebellows, it was included as a 1rr spell instead of a 5r creature, because it was almost always evoked and Rude Awakening is included as a 6gg spell, since it’s almost always played with the entwine cost. Don’t think that you should include everything at a lower mana cost, as this is only cheating the system, as the purpose of doing using a mana curve of the first place. The whole point of using a converted mana cost average system is to help you identify how your mana curve truly plays out and to identify strengths and weaknesses in each color, as well as your entire cube.

While cards with lower mana costs aren’t necessarily aggro cards (and conversely, cards with higher mana costs aren’t necessarily control cards) – the concept of having a good mana curve in a cube is good to follow, as not having enough low casting cost cards, or at least aggro-friendly cards, does not allow aggressive decks to thrive.

A good rule to follow is that each color in a cube should have a casting cost average (ignoring X spells and any color-aligned lands) as close to 3 as possible, with colors such as blue skewing higher (to about 3.3-3.5) and colors such as red skewing lower (to about 2.7-2.9.) Again, each color should play to its strengths and many of blue’s more powerful cards cost a lot of mana, so its average mana cost should be higher than other colors’.

Don’t freak out, though, if you put Bogardan Hellkite into your red section and red’s average converted casting cost goes up, because average converted casting cost shouldn’t be used for the sole metric regarding your cube’s mana curve and balance of archetypes, but it’s a good general barometer in that, for example, your average conveted mana cost for blue is 3.65, you should look into cutting some expensive cards.

This step makes you more critically analyze the merits of the cards in the section as getting your average converted casting cost to as close to 3 as possible enacts a certain degree of discipline for your cube by making you ask questions like these “Is this card REALLY worth 6 mana? Is it as good as the other options at the same mana cost?” This process makes you give cards a much more critical look, not so much regarding whether a card is good (because very few cards that will ever enter a cube will be bad cards) but rather regarding whether the card does enough for its casting cost. This imposed discipline also makes sure that you do not use too many control cards as using an average converted mana costs mimics natural curves in decks. Like I said earlier, using too many cards with high mana costs won’t do well, and a cube with a mana curve like that won’t allow for aggro decks to be able to be a healthily draftable archetype.

This is the very reason is why I’m advocating examining your mana curve – to see if cards do enough when compared to other options at the same mana cost. Sorting cards by their mana costs help to make comparisons like these and realize that some cards may not be as powerful as other options in the same casting cost even if at first glance, the card seems powerful, because it very well may be just a man behind a curtain.

This doesn’t mean that a cube shouldn’t use powerful high-casting cost cards, but the problem is not only having an unhealthy mana curve due to many putting in too many expensive cards but also using suboptimal control cards at the cost of excluding powerful aggressive cards, for example, using Ryusei, the Falling Star over Jackal Pup.

Do I do enough for 6 mana in cube? ...not really.

You’re probably thinking “Ok, this guy’s been going on and on about Jackal Pup, which is good and all, but there’s no way that it’s better than Ryusei. Wasn’t it a first pick in Kamigawa draft?” There are a few problems with this.

In a cube with 55 red slots like mine does, Ryusei, the Falling Star should never make the cut. It’s true that in something like Kamigawa-era draft, Ryusei was a very high pick as it was not only a 5/5 flier for 6 mana, but being a mass removal effect (albeit, an inconsistent one.) Yet, I’m not running it nor will I ever run it in my cube. Why? The key is understanding context.

Unless a dragon (generic term for a 6 mana 5/5 flier) has a significant drawback, it will always be played in limited due to its large size relative to other creatures in the format and evasion. Similarly with Wrath effects, unless a wrath effect is prohibitively costed, it will be extremely good because there are hardly any Wrath effects in the format. However, cube cards do not have this inherent premium to them and for 6 mana, creatures like Hellkite Charger, Rorix Bladewing and Crater Hellion do more for 6 mana than Ryusei (this doesn’t even include non-creature 6 mana red cards like Wildfire and Burning of Xinye.)

The most important reason to organize your cube by cube by mana costs is to help you easily compare cards with similar casting costs and forcing you to more critically evaluate the worth of cards in your cube. Even the act of putting the cards into their respective casting cost sections can help determine if anything is inefficient for its mana cost compared to already existing options at the cost or if there are too many cards at a specific casting cost for a color.

When I placed my white creatures in a row, these were the 3-drop creatues that I was running.

It slices, dices, and resets Planeswalkers!

Flickerwisp
Pianna, Nomad Captain
Soltari Champion
Spectral Procession
Mirror Entity

After looking critically at them, I thought that Flickerwisp stuck out as the weakest out of these available options and thus removed it. Was I saying that Flickerwisp was a bad card? Of course not! It’s a 3/1 flier for 3 with a myriad of uses (resetting planeswalkers, Tangle Wire and Smokestack, killing token creatures, temporarily removing blockers and making lands like Azorius Chancery force an “extra bounce” when the land comes back into play and even making julienne fries!) Still, I felt that it was the weakest out of the options that I had for white 3 drop creatures and thus it got cut. Sorting out your cube by casting costs helps moments of insight like these happen more often.

As discussed earlier, my friend has made his commons cube more friendly for aggro decks and has helped them become a much more healthily draftable archetype that can, most importantly, consistently win games from doing many of the steps that I’ve referred to in this article. Interestingly enough, it’s had more far reaching aspects than one would initially think; it even changed how some cards functioned, which has special significance with regards to mana curve. Someone who drafted his commons cube in its early days said “I pay for everything <in this cube> at full value, I never evoke or pay for anything without kicker.” It struck me as odd… but after having a moment of clarity, the statement made sense.

Because aggressive strategies were losing ones, not only did you have to get as much of the card advantage out of cards like Ingot Chewer as games would often end up in slow card advantage wars. Contrast this with how Ingot Chewer is almost always evoked in Vintage, due to the fact there is a much higher premium to use mana efficiently and that games are generally quick (as well as cards like Wasteland, Rishadan Port, Tangle Wire and Smokestack taxing mana.) Since my friend has taken steps towards making aggro more viable, Ingot Chewer was no longer just cast as a 4R creature, but more as a R spell due to the way his cube changed.

If you have Microsoft Excel, I’ve created a spreadsheet that does the math for converted mana costs (with hybrid cards included) and even has some graphs if you’re more visual. If you don’t have Excel, I’d highly suggest downloading OpenOffice (because if anything, it’s a great free program) and using the spreadsheet for your own cube, after all, I’ve done all of the hard work! Deckstats.net is also a wonderful site for doing the numbers crunch with your cube to notice patterns and statistics. It even lets you input “true” mana costs for cards, for example you can enter Spectral Procession as a WWW card.

Conclusion

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this article about the more theoretical aspects of cube drafting. If you’re a cube designer, I hope that this article has gotten you to take a deeper look into the cards in your cube and has challenged some assumptions you may have had about the format. If you’re just a person who likes to cube draft, I hope that this article gave you a nice “behind the scenes” look into what makes up the format you enjoy and maybe pique your interest in designing your own cube. I’ve had a lot of fun designing my cube and am extremely proud of my list and how it has been designed, and being able to share the joy that I’ve felt in designing my cube makes all of the time that I’ve spent designing and maintaining my cube worth it. Creating a balanced environment in all facets (an environment where neither aggro nor control is too strong) is difficult and ultimately, most of your work in cube design will be in creating and maintaining a balanced drafting environment that’s fun to draft and which happens to feature the best cards of all time.

Cheers and happy cubing!

- Usman Jamil

Special thanks to Usman for sending this in! – Evan