Do you like Magic?  Of course you do.  Cube drafting?  Probably – I haven’t found anyone who doesn’t.  How about Sci-Fi?  It’s not a far-fetched to say that sci-fi fans and magic fans have a bit of overlap.

With Innistrad on the horizon, Magic 2012 is fast settling into its role as the core set that will oversee Standard for the next year. The mythic titans return once again alongside a bunch of new Planeswalkers and various other format defining cards like Solemn Simulacrum and Skinshifter . We here at The Peasant Cube however concern ourselves not with mythic bombs and spikey rares, but with the strong – if not necessarily sexy – workhorses of the set. And while the set if full of good, fascinating and staple cards with black and silver expansion symbols, below are a selection of some of our favourites along with other peasant-legal cards that we think are among the most interesting. Both old and new are present and we’ve provided a brief commentary on the card along with a suggestion or two for alternatives.

Reprints

Acidic Slime

This is an all-round strong cards and it’s good to see it back for another year. Green is not short of Naturalize effects, and Creeping Mold and Ice Storm effects can be found in green without looking too hard. The advantage of having the Slime in the cube is twofold. It gives card advantage to a colour that is often lacking in that department. It also goes some lengths to breaking the redundancy in green; a pile with Krosan Grip, Seal of Primordium and Acidic Slime is more interesting/less repetitive than Grip, Naturalize and Creeping Mold. It also has a more interesting interaction with cards like Zombify and Momentary Blink.

As far as the stats go, a 2/2 for 5 mana is not normally something to brag about. It trades down with smaller, cheaper creatures, however having death touch means it also trades up with bigger, expensive creatures too. This means that, on the defensive at least, you don’t lose as too mana in the exchange.

Similar to: Creeping Mold, Indrik Stomphowler

Auramancer

This has returned in M12 to facilitate the sets enchantment sum-theme. While your cube may not have enchantments in the same quantity as the core set, the chances are the overall quality of the average enchantment is greater than M12’s. Auras such as Faiths Fetters, Control Magic and Armadillo Cloak often end up in the graveyard as your opponent gets rid of them or the creatures they enchant. Other enchantments, like the seals, Compulsion and Zektar Shrine Expedition put themselves in the bin doing half of the work for you. Auramancer may have identity issues. It is only be a 2/2 for 3 mana which means in may not be good in an aggressive weenie strategy and the card advantage may not be necessary in a control strategy. That said, I’m sure white weenie wouldn’t say no to rebuying a previously countered Rancor. Nor blue-white control to getting back a Volition Reins.

Similar to: Dowsing Shaman, Skull of Orm

Belltower Sphinx

I am personally a big fan of Belltower Sphinx. It is an alternate win condition card with utility outside of a dedicated mill strategy. This is something that a lot of alternate win conditions have difficulty achieving.

Aside

Strategies such as decking and poison are often parasitic; you need to fill your deck with as many cards with that goal as possible. If you don’t, your deck ends up weaker than a deck that wins through conventional means. From a cube builder’s perspective that means that if you include any mill cards, you need to include enough for it to be a viable strategy. If you don’t people will quickly realise its not a playable deck and what few cards you do have in the cube end up dead cards taking up valuable cube real-estate. What number of cards equates “enough” is a matter of opinion but you should take into consideration the size of your cube with regards to the percentage of cards that actually get seen in each draft.

End aside

Belltower Sphinx is a mill card disguised as a big flying creature. It is a win condition on two fronts and slots nicely into any blue mill deck while also being playable in control. This means that players not in a dedicated mill strategy (of which there are likely to be many) can play it and it won’t always end up 15th pick when nobody want to draft in that direction. In this respect it has a similar role to Broken Ambitions or Lurking Informant as opposed to cards like Millstone or Tome Scour which have one function only.

Similar to: Soratami Mindsweeper, Flint Golem

Gideon’s Lawkeeper

This isn’t strictly a reprint. It is however almost identical to Goldmeadow Harrier. Even their types are similar; they are both soldiers. One mana tappers are good because they act as cheap removal which can then upgrade when a bigger creature is summoned, similar to Prison Term. They also help to break up the redundancy of white removal which is often a variant of Pacifism or Sword to Plowshares. While tapping a creature down may not be able to deal with creatures that have abilities in the same way that ‘destroy’ or ‘exile’ effects or lethal damage can, being able to control when a player uses an ability with a

Similar to: Goldmeadow Harrier, Blinding Souleater, Benalish Trapper

Sengir Vampire

An old fan favourite, Sengir Vampire has made this list to celebrate being back at uncommon in the core set. Last seen in 10th edition as a rare, the vampire is a powerful creature for black and can be both top of the curve in a Bx aggressive deck, or a finisher in UB control. The leeching ability is often a win-more however just a couple of triggers can put it out of the range for most removal and creatures to deal with. Sengir Vampire mirrors Serra Angel in both stats and history, both playing similar roles in black and white respectively.

Similar to: Skyshroud Vampire, Fallen Angel

Thran Golem

Thran Golem is one of two reprinted cards in this list where M12 is their debut at uncommon. It is also a card that ties in with M12’s enchantment sub-theme. Unlike Auramancer however, it only interacts with auras that you are happy to put on your own creatures. These are scarce in comparison to Pacifism style auras due to the potential for loss of card advantage. There are some auras that have built in card advantage in order to mitigate the potential loss such as Rancor and Griffin Guide. Others, such as Armadillo Cloak and Pollenbright Wings are so powerful that even one hit from an enchanted Golem makes them worthwhile. While a 3/3 for 5 is unexciting, a 5/5 with flying, first strike and trample is game winning. Having just a couple of auras that can ‘turn on’ Thran Golem is probably enough and can make it a good inclusion in your cube without the need for an aura subtheme.

Similar to: Igneous Golem, Golem Artisan

Volcanic Dragon

Something that has been lacking in Magic’s history is common and uncommon dragons. The best we had are baby dragons or drakes. To fill the role of ‘dragon’ – i.e. big red flying beater – we’ve had to turn to cards such as Sabertooth Wyvern and Geyser Glider. All this ends with M12! Volcanic Dragon is the other card on our list of rares-turned-uncommon and will give a big boost to red decks in pauper cubes across the world. This is one of the cards I’m personally more excited about for my cube as red has been under represented in the past and was easily outclassed in the late game by other colours angels, demons, elementals, wurms and such.

Similar to: Nothing at un/common!

Zombie Infestation

This is an interesting win condition for black decks that draw a lot of cards or expect games to go long. It is also a discard outlet for cards with madness, getting Wonder in the bin or to make yourself hellbent etc. Zombie Infestation does a lot of the same things as Psychatog but is a bit less efficient. However in peasant cube there are less sweepers than most other formats whereas there is a lot of strong point removal making a bunch of 2/2s sometimes more relevant than a single big creature. While Zombie Infestation may not be a powerhouse, it in a win condition that can facilitate some nice interactions with other cards and mechanics giving the players unique tools to play with.

Similar to: Savage Conception, Skirk Ridge Exhumer

New

Arachnus Web

Green removal is always something that raises an eyebrow. It is usually clunky and overcosted. Arachnus Web actually looks pretty good as an Arrest variant. That is until you reach the last line of text. In M12 draft you have the chance to play the web alongside Arachnus Spinner which means that the web can be a source of card advantage and even though you have to sacrifice it when it’s on a big creature, you can bring it back again as long as its counterpart is still in play. In peasant cube you don’t have the ability to pair them together as Arachnus Spinner is a rare. Still, the web is the best of a bad bunch when it comes to green removal and if you’re dead set on giving green this type of ability, Arachnus Web may be the answer you have been looking for.

Similar to: Entangling Vines, Utopia Vow

Aven Fleetwing

The hexproof ability of this card is what really makes it stand out (that and the awesome artwork). While a 2/2 flier for 4 may not be the most efficient body ever printed, its ability to doge removal while flying over head makes this card a viable route to victory. The one sidedness of hexproof means that Aven Fleetwing can be enchanted or equipped to speed up the clock and make it more of a brawler in creature combat. Aven Fleetwing may not look all that impressive at first glance but the combination of unblockability and untargetablility means that it can take over games if people don;t pay it the attention it deserves.

Similar to: Advanced Hoverguard, Shimmering Glasskite

Azure Mage

There has been a debate in the past on whether having an ability like this on a fragile creature is better than having it on an enchantment or artifact. Sure, Treasure Trove can’t attack for two, but it can’t be bolted either. Much like how Dark Confidant is considered far and away better than Dark Tutelage, I think Azure Mage is much stronger for being stood on two legs. Being able to attack and block early while still having reach late game means this guy is rarely a dead draw. You may not be too happy if you see it in your opening hand but at least you will get some utility.

It should also be pointed out that the activated ability doesn’t require a tap as part if the cost. This not only means that you can throw it into the red zone and still draw a card, but when you hit eight mana you can start drawing two additional cards a turn which will make it very hard for you to lose in long, drawn out games.

Similar to: Enclave Cryptologist, Jayemdae Tome

Buried Ruin

Peasant-legal utility lands tend to be – other than a few exceptions – rather lackluster. Cards such as Gods’ Eye, Gate to the Reikai and Zoetic Cavern are enlisted to keep numbers up and drafting them interesting. Buried Ruin comfortably sits between completely broken and borderline useless and gives decks that can use it a powerful effect. Returning a Serrated Arrows, Armillary Sphere or any artifact creature can be crucial late game when the need for extra land is minimal and the need for extra spells is a premium.

Similar to: Not a whole lot, nothing at un/common

Jade Mage

Throughout Magic’s history, the majority of creatures that make 1/1 tokens tend to have built in mechanisms to stop the swarm coming too hard, too fast. The most common of these is a tap activation meaning that, without a way to untap, you can only create one token per turn. This is not the case with Jade Mage which can allow you to make multiple tokens a turn if you have enough mana. This is likely as the activation costs of three mana is actually quite cheap, especially at un/common. This means that two activations costs six, three cost nine etc. Compare this to an activation of four, which is more common in the past, which costs eight mana to activate twice and a whopping twelve mana to activate just three times. I don’t wish to labour the point but I want it to be clear that while three mana may not seem that cheap at first, it soon becomes obvious that only costing three is a big deal.

Similar to: Imperious Perfect, Selesnya Guildmage

Manalith

Recently we had a cycle of artifacts like this in the Shard of Arala Obelisks. Seven years prior to that, we had the invasion cameos. Manalith is a strict upgrade to all of these in a straight up comparison however including one over the other change significantly change the dynamic of your cube.

If you chose to include the cameos, each allied colour pair has access to one, completely on-colour cameo. If you choose to include the obelisks, each allied pair now has access to two 3-mana on-colour ramp artifacts. This not only increases competition for each card, but also increases the number of artifact colour fixing spells a deck can have. If you choose to have Manalith in your cube instead, you have just one card that fills all roles, instead of splitting them up between five cards. This means that there is more competition for the card when drafting (which translates to it getting picked higher) but also decreases how many artifact ramp spells a deck can play. This has a knock on effect that makes aggressive decks a bit more powerful.

It would be wrong to talk about mana artifacts without giving a brief mention of the ravinca signets which are stronger than the cameos I’ve talked about above. Usman Jamil wrote a great article about the signets here on starcitygames.com which I highly recommend.

Similar to: Alloy Myr, [/card]Darksteel Ingot[card]

Master Thief

Taking control of an opponents creature has always been a strong effect in limited as it not only gives you +1 creatures but also gives your opponent -1 creatures which effectively puts you ahead by two. This is why Mind Control is the best non-rare in M12 limited. While the number of creatures you can steal with Master Thief is limited to robots, the fact it can steal non-creatures opens it up to another world of possibilities. Stealing an untapped mana artifact can put you just as far ahead as stealing a creature can and any artifact win a one use ability or sacrifice ability such as Courier’s Capsule or Armillary Sphere counteracts the clause that you lose control of the artifact when Master Thief dies. Another interesting interaction is with equipment. If you steal your opponents Loxodon Warhammer and equip it to your own creature, when [/card]Master Thief[/card] is gone, the equipment will stay attached to your dude until the opponent pays the equip cost to put it on one of theirs. If they don’t have a creature to equip, the warhammer will stay on your guy even though your opponent control it once again.

Similar to: Aladdin

Sorin’s Thirst

The double black in the cost of this card make it an interesting draft pick. Something like Incinerate or Doom Blade will often be the first or second card to get picked out a booster because there is a good chance it will get played regardless of the colours that player ends up in. Sorin’s Thirst is comparable to the aforementioned cards in terms or power level however it is significantly more difficult to splash in a deck that isn’t running a lot of black. If you’re aiming to build a cube where splashing is difficult then Sorin’s Thirst is powerful removal that rewards players for going into black.

Similar to:Vicious Hunger, Devour in Shadow

Stormblood Berserker

The spiritual successor to Scab-Clan Mauler with an easier casting cost. Stormblood Berserker is an aggressive two-drop in a colour that history has shown needs a lot of help. The biggest problem here is that the best one-drop red creatures are often rare. There are no Goblin Guides or Grim Lavamancers to help make the beserkers a 3/3 on turn two and this may be something you’d have to keep in mind if you add this to your cube. One way around this is free spells such as Gut Shot or delayed spells like Rift Bolt or Seal of Fire. However aiming burn spells at the opponents head on turn two may be card disadvantage that only weakens the red deck in the long run.

Similar to: Plated Geopede, Keldon Marauders

[/card]Timely Reinforcements[/card]

Timely Reinforcements has recently been proving its strength in Caw-Blade decks which can take advantage of both the life gain against aggressive decks, and the creatures in any match up where a sword is good. In peasant cube, I’m sure it will be a solid all rounder providing decks with life and bodies when under pressure. Because of the Land Tax-esque restriction it may end up in the sideboard of tempo-based Wx aggro decks but it is most likely to find a home in white-blue control decks. Where ever it ends up, it is going to hose aggressive decks, especially red ones, and this is something that should be considered before you include it in your cube.

Simlar to: Even the Odds, Spectral Procession

Turn to Frog

Blue removal is often non-to-semi-permanent and tempo based such as Unsummon, Frozen Solid, Sleep or Mind Control. This means that blue needs to seek help from other colours and solely use that colours removal, or it needs to be in a tempo-based aggro deck. As green also lacks decent removal spells, blue-green decks often need to be tempo-orientated to be successful. Turn to Frog is the most recent card in a long line of Humble type effects and fills a specific role in the Ux tempo decks. It can shrink big creatures mid combat, it can almost fog a creature, and it can stop annoying combat abilities such as deathtouch and lifelink.

Similar to: Ovinise, Snakeform

Hopefully this short walk through Magic 2012 has brought a few new options to light for your own cubes; be it brand spanking new M12 cards or reprints, or older analogues you didn’t know exist. Please feel free to hit me up with any questions, queries or comment either here, on my site or direct on twitter.

Lennox
@mtg_lennox

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

I’ve been playing cube drafts for about three years and it constitutes about 90 percent of my time playing Magic. I draft on a regular basis with a group of about twelve players from my local store ranging from low to high skill levels. I also draft with new players and out-of-state friends at pre-releases and PTQs. With such experience, I’d like to share a few of my thoughts about the keys to success in this format. The value of my advice will vary based upon the cards contained in each cube and player preferences, but these insights should be fairly universal and of use to any cube enthusiasts.

Efficient Use of Mana, More Than Any Other Factor, Wins Games

“I believe that long term success in Magic, and the definition of the best decks, is determined primarily by how much mana we can profitably consume.” -Michael J. Flores, Jockey for the Beatdown- 11/1/2010

Mike is spot-on. Regardless of your skill or the power level of the cards in your deck, the easiest way to lose games is by not making a play until turns there or four. Successful decks need to be able to use their mana every turn beginning on turn two (even if it’s cycling on realistically bluffing a counterspell). This rule has three important strategic applications:

1. Drafting & Constructing a Deck: be conscious of your curve and look for cards which provide multiple options at different mana costs. Additionally be aware of your color commitments; drafting several cards in two different colors with double (or more) colored casting costs will lead to inefficient mana use unless you are willing to highly prioritizing fixing. The most troublesome combinations for double many costs are in W/B and U/B.
2. Mulligan Decisions: As I general rule of thumb, I will mulligan away any hand in which my first action will be on turn four. I will mulligan away most hands in which my first action will be on turn three unless I have tempo-gaining cards such as Man-o-War, Venser, Shaper Savant, or Control Magic.
3. Game Play: The abundance of activated abilities and card draw ensure that Cube is a format in which you will almost always have something to do with your mana at any point in the game. Mana used now saves you from having to spend mana later for the same effect, so you should be looking to tap out (or come as close as possible) every turn. For example, given the option between keeping an Eternal Dragon in hand and cycling it turn two, you should almost always cycle it even if your hand is already land heavy. You’ll be taking one more card out of your deck, ensuring a late land drop, and giving yourself the option to recur the Dragon later. Another example: perhaps you hold back on turn three with Exclude and Repulse in hand. Your opponent attacks with some irrelevant 2/2 and passes the turn casting nothing. Here you should almost always Repulse the 2/2 to gain tempo rather than saving it in hopes or a more opportunistic use.

Draft a Fundamentally Blue, Red, or Combo Deck

This statement is not synonymous with the standard beatdown/control/combo archetype classification: you need to be playing with blue cards, red cards, or a combo deck. Additionally, if playing blue or red, those cards need to be doing some of the fundamental things which are the core strengths of these colors. These colors possess two key strengths largely absent from the remaining colors, each addressed below.

1. Abundance of relevant instants: the value of instant speed cards should be apparent to anyone who has played the game for any significant period of time (more options, the ability to essentially pool two turns of mana against an opponent’s one turn, surprise factor). In most limited formats instants are less powerful (or more costly) compared to sorcery-speed counterparts for the purpose of creating balanced limited formats. Most cube drafts owners, however, create their cube looking to include the most powerful cards in each given color. While balance is always a consideration in cube construction, it is usually focused upon card quantity within colors and casting cost, not power levels. As a result, cubes often contain an abundance of relevant, powerful instants in blue and red, the two colors which have, through the history of the game, been disproportionately given more powerful instants. While all colors have received many instant speed cards, not all are as relevant to cube. Examining each color:White: white’s instants vary from one-for-one spot removal (addressed below), artifact/enchantment tutors, damage redirection, disenchant effects, and lifegain. These cards often lack the ability to generate card advantage outside of limited situations.Black: almost all of black’s instants are spot removal, which is not very strong. Two important exceptions: Hatred (which can just win a game) and Corpse Dance (a card which can be played multiple times for great value depending on the deck).Green: green is severely lacking instants (my cube contains only Vines of the Vastwood, Stonewood Invocation, and Krosan Grip). Aside from the shallow pool of green instants to choose from, most green instants in other cubes open a player up to easy two-for-ones (most other pump spells, Harrow, etc.).

   Blue: Blue gets counterspells, card drawing, deck manipulation, tutoring, and bounce. Counterspells are rarely dead in this format, generate tempo, and sometimes draw extra cards. Bounce spells in my cube (Repeal and Repulse) can be grouped in with card drawing as generating card advantage and tempo. Tutoring and deck manipulation prevent dead draws and draw other powerful cards.

   Red: Red is almost exclusively burn spells and Threaten effects (Grab the Reins and Word of Seizing). The true value of red’s instants, discussed below, is their flexibility to fight for board advantage or to burn out your opponent for the win.

2. The ability to win despite board position: Blue and red have the greatest pool of cards that give a player the option to “play their game” regardless of board position. Nearly all of the cards in White, Black, and Green affect only the board or advance the player in a defensive manner (such as life gain) as opposed to an active manner to win the game. These colors tend to generate tempo by casting spells in their main phase, destroying permanents, and curving out with their permanents. Blue, however, can often disregard board position through tempo-generating cards, while red has the option of sending all burn spells to the opponent once the red player loses board advantage.

These two qualities give any deck which utilizes these strengths a significant advantage over other decks which fail to do so. This rule leaves the remaining colors (black, green, and white) to be played in conjunction with blue and red card or together in combo decks. Competitive combo decks, including blue or red decks without instants include:

1. Reanimator decks: best centered around some recursive engine such as Recurring Nightmare or Corpse Dance.
2. Blue-based artifact decks: best centered around tutors and cards such as Tinker, Tezzeret, the Seeker , and the Thopter Combo.
3. Reveillark decks: best centering around either Crystal Shard/Blink effects or the Body Double/ Karmic Guide combo.
4. Stax Decks: more of a synergistic deck than a combo deck. Best centered around sacrifice effects such as Braids, Cabal Minion and Smokestacks combined with cards like Bitterblossom, Bloodghast, Crucible of Worlds, and Strip Mine.

Draft Archetypes Instead of Cards

This rule naturally follows the previous rule, but requires a little more explanation. Your goal with your first few picks should be to draft cards which create an engine for you to inevitably win the game. Instead of drafting independently valuable cards (Wrath effects, most card draw effects, most green creatures) you should seek out cards which create a synergistic deck. For example, when I take an early Upheaval, cards such as Greater Gargadon, Aeon Chronicler, Shelldock Isle, Tarmogoyf, Psychatog, and Tombstalker greatly climb in my pick orders.

This isn’t to say you must open the pivotal cards early to build the deck. You can often anticipate certain cards being passed to you in later packs, especially in smaller cubes (e.g. Braids, Cabal Minion, Oath of Druids , Opposition). The cards you can reasonably anticipate will vary based upon cube composition and the other player’s preferences, but you will often be surprised at how often you “get there.”

A special note regarding beatdown decks: you might be thinking beatdown decks are a generic catch-all for small creature decks. These decks, however, can be drafted in several different directions. For example, R/G can be drafted as (1) a sligh deck with one and two-drop creatures and 10+ burns spells, (2) a tempo based LD Deck with many two and three-drops with cards such as Avalanche Riders, Pillage, Molten Rain, and Thoughts of Ruin, or (3) a more high end deck with mana elves and 5 and 6-drop creatures. These archetypes are usually much more powerful when focused than merged and as such, you should be drafting cards appropriate for your archetype usually by the beginning of pack 2.

Overvaluing Creature Removal

When making additions to my cube, I try to only add creatures which either (a) are extremely efficient in terms of power level to casting cost (e.g. Tarmogoyf, Goblin Guide, Student of Warfare, Meloku the Clouded Mirror), (b) are resilient to removal (e.g. Simic Sky Swallower, Puppeteer Clique, Hellspark Elemental), and/or (c) give a player some value upon coming into or leaving play (e.g. Solemn Simulacrum, Cloudgoat Ranger, Pestermite). Spot removal has moderate to high value against the first category, very low value to the second, and limited value to the third. Wrath effects share many of the same problems. For this reason, creature removal should rarely be taken early in cubes with less than 1000 cards. I will almost always play a few, but rarely use early picks to do so.

The Best Cards You’re Probably Passing

The following is a few cards from each color which I believe players tend to undervalue:

1. Guardian of the Guildpact: probably undervalued because of unfamiliarity. Very few things kill him, so he’s usually either an indestructible wall or unblockable, which makes him deadly with equipment.
2. Mana Tithe/ Force Spike: almost always a one-mana Counterspell. It can often mean the difference between a win and a loss for a control deck on the draw.
3. Remand: few cards gain tempo like Remand. This card can easily make me keep an otherwise must-mulligan 2-land hand. Similarly, Venser, Shaper Savant also provides backbreaking tempo and gains additional value if you have any means to reuse him.
4. Looter il-Kor: I have won more cube drafts because of this card than any other. He is passed very late, rarely draws a removal spell from most opponents, is deadly with equipment, and smoothes out your draws. I feel that if he hits an opponent three or more times that I cannot lose the game.
5. Corpse Dance: You can easily draft a deck around this card abusing ETB abilities or creatures which die during an endstep (Ball Lightning, Skizzik, Blistering Firecat).
6. Dusk Urchins: a solid creature at home both in a beatdown or a control deck, developing the board and drawing cards. It will almost always give you a two-for-one and sometimes more.
7. Greater Gargadon: one of the few first-pick quality red cards. This enormous threat prevents your opponent from targeting your creatures for value (e.g. Control Magic, Capsize with Buyback, Ribbons of Night). It also has great synergy with mass LD cards such as Armageddon, Upheaval, Balance, and Obliterate.
8. Ingot Chewer: I always try to run at least one or two maindeck answers to artifacts and this comes with a serviceable body attached. The evoke cost becomes very useful in playing around counterspells and for storm decks (if your cube supports those).
9. Rude Awakening: passed way too late way too often. Resolution usually = gg.
10. Briarhorn: a pump spell without the potential two-for-one opponent’s removal spell. Flash gives this card a very fundamentally blue feel.
11. Tanglewire: played turns 3-5 in an aggressive deck usually wins the game.
12. Epochrasite: the Rodney Dangerfield of artifacts. This card is amazing for stopping beats and plays very well with Upheaval or Armageddon effects.
13. Spellbound Dragon: I’m pretty sure Wizards intended this guy to cost six. It will filter hands while putting an opponent on a short clock.
14. Plaxmanta: blowout. After Looter il-Kor, this card has won me more games than any other. Card advantage and a massive tempo swing all for 2 mana.
15. Shelldock Isle: For forgoing 3 mana, you usually flip a card from your deck of a higher casting cost. Highlights include Upheaval, Obliterate, and Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker. Be mindful of LD spells if you’re considering putting a combo piece underneath.

My No-Pass List

There are almost no cards I would draft over the following: Reveillark, Balance, Ancestral Recall, Vedalken Shackles, Upheaval, Treachery, Recurring Nightmare, Mind Twist, Sol Ring, Black Lotus, Umezawa’s Jitte, Skullclamp, Sword of Fire and Ice, and Library of Alexandria. With the exceptions of Upheaval and Sword of Fire and Ice, I would take all of the above cards over the five moxes most of the time.

Quick Note on Mulligan Rules

My group has a mulligan rule whereby if you have 0, 1, 6, or 7 lands in your opening hand, you may show your opponent your hand and take a free mulligan. You may repeat this process until you keep a hand or take a real mulligan. If you mulligan, you may once again take a free mulligan if you show a hand of 0, 1, 5, or 6 lands. This patterns continues of 0, 1, max hand size -1, max hand size. All players must play at least 15 lands to avail themselves to free mulligan. I highly recommend this rule as it makes cube drafting much more enjoyable than regular mulligan rules.

In Conclusion

These insights are, again, subject to cube contents and player preferences. While players can utilize any strategy with various degrees of success, these are the strategies which have provided me with the most success in this format. Hope you enjoyed!

-Doug Lambert

When I tell people about my Cube I generally get one of two reactions; “That sounds awesome!” or “You’re ruining Magic.” If you have an open mind and want to experience what I believe to be the most fun way to play Magic then continue on.

What makes my Cube so unique is not the composition, although we exclude many cards that are in every standard Cube. Rather, it’s the game play that is different. We don’t play with any basic lands in our decks. This is not a new idea, tons of other CCGs utilize this mechanic but Magic the Gathering being the first didn’t think to include it. I’m convinced that if Magic was reinvented today with the knowledge that we have it would be done this way.

Here’s how it works: players may on their turn exile any one card from their hand and put into play any one basic land. This can only be done once a turn and only as a sorcery, the same rules that apply to playing basic lands. This mechanic does a variety of things to change the way Magic is played, and will I admit not all of them are benefits. However, I do believe that the benefits greatly outweigh any hindrance. The four results of this change are mana-fixing, deck building speed, increased options and removal of some archetypes.

Mana-Fixing

Our group of Cubers, after playing dozens of times, got together and pondered the following question. What is the worst part about Magic? The answer: getting mana-screwed. How many times have you cursed your deck because you aren’t getting any mana, while your opponent has plenty to spare. The worst part is, you know your deck is good. You keep thinking to yourself, “If only I had some more mana I would have won.” Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. What if you always had enough mana to do what you needed? Now there’s a difference between your opponent playing land destruction or control thereby taking away your ability to have and use mana and simply being mana-screwed.

Obviously, if you play the right cards and balance your deck you can alleviate most situations that would cause a mana-screw. However, there is always a percentage of games where you either get too much mana, not enough mana or the wrong colors of mana. After keeping advanced metrics over dozens of games we discovered that the average deck is susceptible to getting mana-screwed about 20% of the time. That means 1 out of 5 games you will have a severe disadvantage against your opponent.

There’s good news though; our mechanic fixes all three types of mana-screw! Games where this occurs are simply not fun. And in my opinion, the Cube is supposed to be about fun. Let’s take a look at the three types of mana-screw that will ruin your day:

1. Too little mana – In your opening hand you have one or two mana, things look good. But, the next 10 cards you draw are all non-lands. Crap, you are dead. Our Cube doesn’t allow this to happen. If you keep drawing cards you can’t play, just throw them away for mana until you can play something. As soon as you have enough mana in play to do what you need to do, you can stop exiling cards and play everything you draw.

2. Too much mana – This one can happen in two different ways. The first is drawing X lands in a row early. While you are playing lands your opponent is playing cards. The second variation I’m sure all Magic players are familiar with. It’s late in the game, your opponent has just played a bomb and you have two turns to live. On your next turn you draw a Plains. Useless. The following turn you draw a Forest. Thanks a lot deck. This rarely happens in our Cube. It can because you will still have non-basic lands in your deck. But because all of the basic lands are gone, you have 35-38 non land cards in your deck. This almost guarantees that when you need a spell or creature, you will draw one.

3. Wrong color mana – Since the Cube makes 3, 4 and even 5 color decks a possibility, players are often stuck with the wrong mana. How many times have you drawn 3 Plains but really needed blue mana? Our Cube fixes this as well. After drawing your initial hand, you can easily decide what types of mana you’ll need and simply go get them. If you have a Red-Green deck but you draw 6 Green cards in your opening hand guess what color mana is not so important any more?

Deck Building Speed

Once we moved to playing Magic without basic lands we noticed that decks came together after a draft much faster. For one thing, you don’t need to look at the casting cost of each of the cards you drafted and figure out how many of each type of basic land to include. This happens on the fly during the game. If you need a Plains, exile something from your hand and get a Plains. It’s as simple as that.

The other reason that decks can be built faster is that you get to include 40 non-basic land cards. So the time spent deciding on which cards to cut for basic land is non-existent. Usually in our Cube once a player reaches 40 cards they just stop drafting and are immediately ready to play. We cut our “prep” time (that is, all the time before you can actually play a game in a Cube draft) in half. Where it used to take one and a half hours for four people to draft a Cube, now it takes 45 minutes. We’ve gotten so fast that we usually do two entire Cube drafts in one night because playing out an entire Cube only takes about 3 hours.

Increased Options

The second result of removing basic lands is the idea of increased options. If you play 40 card decks in your Cube you will likely run anywhere from 9-16 basic lands. Leaving you at best with 31 spells and creatures. In our Cube you always play with 40 functional cards. This allows more robust decks with greater options at your disposal. Let’s say you’re playing Red, Green Black and in your initial hand you draw 3 Red cards, 3 Black cards and 1 Green. You have the option of exiling the Green card for a Swamp or Mountain. Or not, but you get to make the decision, not the randomness of a draw. Playing Magic the standard way does not allow you to play multiple paths each game. You’re forced to play the cards your dealt unless you have something like Timetwister that allows you to manipulate your hand.

I’ve drafted Cube decks that played totally different three games in a row because I exiled different cards for land. This point cannot be overstated. The manor in which Magic is played without the inclusion of basic lands in decks adds a whole new level of strategy. That is saying something as Magic in general is one of the most strategic card games out there. When you draw a hand that has 7 of the best 400 cards in Magic and you have to throw away a card, that is a tough decision. But isn’t that what makes games great? Tough decisions? Do you throw away a 6CC bomb that does nothing for you now? Or the creature removal spell that you’ll surely need later? What about a 2CC weenie that will pay immediate dividends? Or a mana accelerator? What kind of deck is your opponent playing? If you know he runs very few artifacts maybe you can feel safe exiling that Disenchant.

There’s another effect here that is important to note. This has happened countless times in our Cube drafts. We typically play best two out of three in our Cube. Game one against an opponent I play Living Death for the win. Good times. In the second game though what card turns up in my opening hand? Living Death. I now have the option to say, “You know what, Living Death is awesome, but I just won with it. It might be fun to try a different route in this game. Not to mention, it costs five mana so I can exile it now and play something that costs one mana.” And because my deck has 40 non basic land cards in it, it’s very likely that I have several other finishers. Or maybe I love Living Death enough to play it every game, so I toss something else. The point is, the decision is mine.

Removal of Some Archetypes

The last effect of removing basic lands is what most people grate against. That is the removal of certain types of decks. Land Destruction can still be played in this format but it is much tougher. Obviously if your opponent can play another land every turn you can never hope to remove all of their land. However, getting an advantage with land in play is still incredibly powerful. If on turn five I have five lands and you have three I’m still in a great position.

Obviously there are several control themes that don’t work as well. The pace of our games is much faster than playing the standard way. Though I would still argue that our games are more fun and faster paced than most Cubes. There are several cards that don’t really work in our Cube as a result of excluding basic lands. Fetch lands don’t really serve a purpose anymore. After a while though they aren’t missed because their value was in fixing a problem (mana-screw) that doesn’t exist anymore.

Another common complaint when players first try the no basic land deck is “I don’t want to have to throw away Swords to Plowshares for a land because it’s the worst card in my hand. When you think about it, this isn’t really a legitimate complaint. If you were playing with 28 cards and 12 basic lands, it’s likely that that Swords would have been a basic land. You just wouldn’t have been given the choice to make it one. That is what makes this mechanic great. If you have to cut 12 drafted cards to make room for basic land you may have removed Swords from your deck. I don’t have to make that sacrifice. I can play 40 functional cards and decide which ones, on a game by game basis, become basic land. Maybe I’m deciding between Swords to Plowshares and Disenchant as to which I want to exile for land. Well, if my opponent has a big creature out, I keep Swords. Or, if he has no creatures and Tawnos’s Coffin, then I keep disenchant.

In conclusion, I feel that if you’re willing to give this a try you will not be sorry and will likely never play Magic the standard way again. Everyone that has played our Cube is convinced that this is the most fun way to play. Some were standoffish at first, but now they love it. As a test you can try this: play a Cube where some players keep basic lands in their decks and some don’t. I guarantee that the players without basic lands will win more of the time (provided that all players are of similar ability). First off, the standard players will lose 20% of the time just because they won’t get the mana they need. Secondly, the basic land removers will have more choices in hand.

What have you to lose? If you’re like me, you’ve drafted Cube hundreds of times. Try it without basic lands next time and see what happens. If you hate it you can always go back to the normal way for the next hundred drafts. But if you love it, it will change the way you play Magic for the rest of your life.

- Ben Albert

The stage was set. 34 participants in a Sealed Prerelease Tournament. The set was Mirrodin Beseiged and I was flipping stoked. I freakin’ love prereleases. I was a little worried about the whole faction pack idea, because it’s something new and new stuff is scary. I chose Mirran because if I’m drafting scars I think that Mirran definitely has the edge. Plus, since half the sealed was scars packs, it would only get better if I had 45 more Mirran cards. Right? It sure didn’t feel like it afterward.

Read Chris’s entertaining report and check out his choices for Mirrodin Besieged in Cube Draft!

I opened my scars packs first, so I could savor the new cards last. First thing I see is a foil. Fate is laughing at me. It’s a foil Tower of Calamities . I just happened to open a foil Tower of Calamities in the scars prerelease. I won that one, maybe it’s a sign. I then get a Ratchet Bomb. Okay. I don’t even remember my third scars rare at the moment. My Mirran Faction packs are almost as ironic. Two out of the three have foil phyrexian cards in them, and they’re good ones, which only makes me madder. Pistus Strike and the 2/1 infect flyer Tine Shrike. I suddenly feel like I chose the wrong side, and to make matters worse, my sealed pool is kind of a joke. I have a lot of red and blue, but only 4 black cards. My white is slim but has some good stuff in it. I’ll try to remember some of my cards.

Red

2x Crush (super good card)
3x Gnathosaur (nearly unplayable fatty)
1x Galvanoth (really cool but I got no big splashy spells)
1x Blisterstick Shaman (really good)

Blue

1x Plated Seastrider (cool wall)
1x Vedalken Infuser (a wall that works with stuff)
2x Quicksilver Geyser (better than I thought)
1x Scrapdiver Serpent (gotta have an ace)
1x Neurok Commando (bad, just bad)
1x Neurok Invisimancer (good)
1x Bonds of Quicksilver (slow removal, but still removal)
1x Trinket Mage (Important for 1 very funny reason)
2x Spire Serpant (Really Great dude)

White

1x White Sun’s Zenith (So good but Sooooo White)
3x Divine Offering (OMFG Amazing)
1x Leonin Skyhunter
2x Ardent Recruit
1x Loxodon Wayfarer

Green

I honestly can’t remember a thing out of green it was so laughable except for
2x Slice in Twain

Black

4 black cards. Doesn’t matter what they were, they weren’t getting played.

Artifacts

3x Spin Engine (this guy is bonkers)
1x Sphere of the Suns (strong mana fixing)
3x Shriekhorn (completely wrote this off at first, wow)
1x Ratchet Bomb (good but narrow card)
1x Wall of Tanglecord (best 2 drop around)
1x Neurok Replica
1x Sylvok Replica
1x Strider Harness
1x Barbed Battlegear
1x Piston Sledge
1x Accorder’s Shield (Wins all day)
1x Contagion Clasp
1x Infiltrator Lens
1x Tower of Calamity

So I have a whole bunch of artifacts that I can only use with colors, and no good colored cards to run with them. Red was out, which made me sad, because I really wanted to run all those spin engines. I couldn’t believe I got a whole bunch of red fatties and no small guys or burn. I looked at green and was underwhelmed. I did get 2 Slice in Twain but they are “so green” and I didn’t have anything else to run green for. White looked good, and I knew I couldn’t pass on 3 divine offerings. Blue also had a lot of cool cards. My artifacts were the real kick in the pants. I had no finishers other than 1 Scrapdiver Serpent out of blue so I really needed that from the artifact pool. I was left wanting.

But I did see a really stupid idea forming. I looked at Shriekhorn, looked at Trinket Mage, looked at Contagion Clasp, and finally broke down. Dear God I’m playing Shriekhorn mill.

Well, now that I know what I’m doing, lets see what we play. I gave my white and blue a good hard look. I’m so used to playing metalcraft, that I already had all my metalcraft dudes pulled out to go in the deck. They weren’t going to do anything for me this time, so I dropped all my Ardent Recruits and Spire Serpents. Then, I took out Leonin Skyhunter. The card is bonkers, but it’s double white and dies to whatever it blocks, which is not what I need. In goes everything with 4 toughness, so Neurok Replica, Plated Seastrider, Wall of Tanglecord, and Vedalken Infuser. Gotta play Divine Offering, and White Sun’s Zenith. And all the Equipment too for good measure. I played all the Neurok guys but wish I hadn’t put in the Neurok Commando. I thought that a 2/1 shroud scroll thief was gonna rock, but it turns out other people play creatures. Okay, so we were built. (Sorry for not having an exact decklist, I immediately lost my deck after the sealed event)

Let’s Go.

Round 1

Me vs. Someone’s Girlfriend.

Well at least I’ll make it to round 2.

1-0

Round 2

Me vs. Green Black Infect

Game 1- I dropped Shriekhorn turn 1 and began milling. I got a second and then my Vedalken Infuser shortly after. He had infect guys, but my walls could block his dudes like 3 or 4 times before they died and I got it in there with mill.

Game 2- He pretty much held me down and mistreated me with Plaguemaw Beast He’s big enough to kill most of my walls in one hit, and he combos with infect? Unfair.

Game 3- I had walls and he had nothing. Mill slowly got it there for me. This format is slow.

2-0

Round 3

Me vs. Green Black Infect – Inventive huh?
Game 1- I lose game one to a better version of the deck I just played. Infect is good now. I was just too slow this time.

Game 2- I drop a Neurok Invisimancer and put Piston Sledge on him right away. Then I proceed to beat my opponent almost to death with it. I like Piston Sledge a lot.

Game 3- He drops guys and I drop walls. Trinket Mage rips out my third Shriekhorn from the deck and my Contagion Clasp keeps the charge counters flowing. I get there before he can beat through my defenses. By this point I am starting to wonder if Shriekhorn is good. I used my Divine Offerings at key times to kill guys he has equipped with Silverskin Armor. I like that card because it enables metal-craft really well, but it makes your guys shatterable, and that is definitely why I won this match.

3-0

Round 4

Me vs. Red White Battle cry (a.k.a dear god stop the beatings)

Game 1- So this is the first fast deck I’ve played against and wow was it fast. Leonin Skyhunter is a butt whoopin’, and when you mix it with battle cry guys like Accorder Paladin, and my opponent’s Mirran Crusader it gets even worse. I have one word to describe this game.

Ouch!

He drops Silverskin Armor and I use it to my advantage with my 3 Divine Offerings to rip his guys up. Without the life offset I got from blowing his stuff up, I would have been dead.

Game 2- I’m just gonna outline his plays. Turn 1 land pass. Turn 2 Goblin Wardriver. Turn 3 Leonin Skyhunter. Turn 4 Accorder Paladin. Turn 5 Leonin Skyhunter. Turn 6 he drops Kuldotha Ringleader. Turn 7 Thopter Assembly. I divinely off the Assembly. Doesn’t matter. I’m dead.

Game 3- Turn 1 Shriekhorn mills his top 2 and I get a skyhunter and a wardriver into his yard. Awesome. Next turn, hit it again and I get another Leonin Skyhunter (dear god) and a Kuldotha Pheonix. I’m a little worried at this point. He is still dropping guys but I’m dropping walls. The guys that are hitting the board are artifacts. So, I have divine offering giving me an advantage and keeping him off metalcraft. The last thing I need is a big angry bird scratching my eyes out. I finally get to play White Sun’s Zenith and net 4 kitties for my army. He has Kuldotha Ringleader and has to swing into them, but Soul Parrys my cats, so they get chewed up. Then he drops Thopter Assembly. I swear, I peed a little. However, I had been holding a Divine Offering, because I knew he had it from the last game. I nuke it and gain 6 life at his end of turn. Then, I rip White Sun’s Zenith again. Here comes the Kitty Cat Parade. 5 cat tokens pretty much seal the deal. Man, it was close though. I was at 6 and he had a 3/3 flyer that I couldn’t block, while he had 1 card left in library. Let’s just say that I could have stocked a third world arms dealer with the bullets I was sweating.

4-0

Round 5

Me vs. Green Black Not Infect

Intentional Draw. I played a friendly game with this guy, and he creamed me like a tub of butter. Guess what wrecks a well crafted board position, comprised mainly of artifacts? Creeping Corrosion does. Do you know what kills walls? Carnifex Demon. Did I mention he had Black Sun’s Zenith? Casting the black zenith while Carnifex Demon is in play is almost like cheating.  Super glad I drew with this guy.
4-0-1

I ended the day with 22 packs of delicious faction packy prize. I knew I shouldn’t open them because of their collector value, but I couldn’t help myself. I ended up getting almost all the bomby stuff out of the set that I needed for my cube. All I need now is Massacre Wurm

All in all, I gotta give props to 5 cards for holding down the fort for me.

Shriekhorn- Having 3 let me get one of these turn 1 most games, and I immediately saw advantage from milling my opponents. The annoying thing that I don’t like about any of the charge counter artifacts, is that if you plan on proliferating, you can’t take all the counters off of them. I had lots of games where I was sitting on 2-3 Shriekhorns on the field, all with one counter on them, waiting to draw Contagion Clasp or Vedalken Infuser. In the end, this is the card that won the most for me. Having Trinket Mage get them also helped.

Wall of Tanglecord- I was originally a jerk to this card when I saw it in scars. However, it has SINGLE HANDEDLY won me game, after game, after game by being the best blocker in the format. LOVE THIS WALL.

Divine Offering- Move over Revoke Existence. There’s a new guy in town, and he is Instant speed. It makes all the difference in the world too. This goes from being a way to get rid of artifacts – to a combat trick. Never pass this card.

White Sun’s Zenith- Even though I only had 3 white to cast it in one game the whole tournament, this card completely won that game all on it’s own. The only cards that stop the Kitty Cat Parade are other bomb rares.

Quicksilver Geyser- I didn’t put this in the original deck, but ended up boarding it in almost every time. Bouncing two things is really strong, and as slow as this format was, getting to 5 mana wasn’t hard. When they swing in, and you bounce an equipment and an attacker, taking him off metal-craft and blunting his assault, it kind of wrecks their whole day.

Honorable Mention goes to….

Piston Sledge- This card is just solid.

Besieged in the Cube

This leads into what I really wanted to talk about. Which cards from Mirrodin Besieged are good enough for my cube? There are so many powerful effects coming out as of late that I feel like my cube has turned into a shapeshifting beast that morphs into a new creature every time a set comes out. I miss Homelands. I would never have to change stuff if sets like that came out again. (Just kidding)

Red

Hero of Oxid Ridge- This guy hits so hard and so fast. I can’t see not playing him. Haste is a much bigger advantage than people give it credit for and i limiteed it can really be devastating. Imagine a spell that said “This spell deals 4 damage to target opponent, creatures you control get +1/+0 until end of turn and creatures with power 1 or less can’t block this turn” How much would that spell cost? 5 or 6? Well our new Red hero just costs 4! He certainly is my hero and I’ll bet he will be yours too.

Slagstorm-I love Flamebreak a lot, and if it wasn’t so red I’d have it in my cube. Then they print Slagstorm. Great!

Blue

I haven’t added any cards to blue in a while. The only one I can even think might make it in is Steel Sabotage. nah.

Green

Thrun, the Last Troll-This guy could make it in on flavor alone! The last troll? Come on! He’s a bigger, badder, uncounterable Troll Ascetic. The only thing that ever killed Troll Ascetic was Pyroclasm and similar cards that could hit while you didn’t have regenerate mana up. This guy laughs those off while coming back for seconds. Plus, he’s the Last Troll!

Green Sun’s Zenith-This is a card that has me on the fence. It only tutors green creatures, which seems narrow. However, what deck running green wouldn’t play this? I think it will be a powerhouse, but only time will tell.

White

Mirran Crusader- What if Paladin en-Vec had double strike? Oh……he does now.  Feels good man. Protection from Green instead of Red means this guy will die to burn all day long. Double Strike more than makes up for that thought. Pro Green can still be relevant in some ways though. Like when you don’t have a wrath.

Accorder Paladin- I actually just dropped Blade of the Sixth Pride out of my cube because he was underappreciated. Now he’s back and ready to kick butt. Battlecry is strong and I can’t wait to see some white weenie go for the gold with it. Oooh and Red/White goblins. Oh oh and Black/White tokens!  OMG Green/White tokens! I better stop there.

Hero of Bladehold- I love this guy for all the same reasons I love Accorder Paladin. Except for one little thing. This guy brings friends. In a format where Lightning Greaves, Sneak Attack, and a myriad of other ways to grant haste exist, this Hero should be nigh unstoppable.

Black

Phyrexian Crusader- Now this guy is Blacks Paladin en-Vec. He’s immune to all the relevant removal in a cube. On top of that, First strike and infect are a pretty awesome combo. He walks over 3/3’s without even offering to pay for dinner. I think this dude is going to be a thorn in many people’s sides for a long time to come.

Black Sun’s Zenith- I have wanted to run Mutilate for a LONG time, but could never get over the fact that you had to be playing mono-black for it to be any good. Well here comes the answer to my prayers. It is more expensive than other sweepers like Damnation and the like, but you probably won’t even need it till later in the game anyway. How often do you Damnation on turn 4? I don’t unless I’m playing against super aggro. And don’t overlook that shuffle in effect. While it seems innocuous, it’s on a spell that is the same color as Demonic Tutor, and Vampiric Tutor. I think this will be a strong and highly picked card.

Go for the Throat- Why Wizards? Why? After you printed Doom Blade, I dropped Terror for a while. Then I finagled it back in under the pretense that it was okay to run two pretty redundant cards because it was on flavor.  Then you print this card!?! How am I supposed to justify running my SUPER COOL Signed Beta Terror now? I can’t even hate the new card for being dorky or anything. It’s called Go for the Throat for Urza’s sake! And it kills pretty much everything. A solid upgrade. Wow foils of it are $6 already.

Artifact

Sword of Feast and Famine-Number 4 of the sword cycle is here and boy does it do some crazy stuff. I have already heard cries that this is the worst sword. I say they’re wrong. The Swords all do something nobody ever mentions. They change the way your opponent plays. Sword of Fire and Ice stops your opponent from playing any creatures with 2 or less toughness. Sword of Light and Shadow forces them to go aggro to offset the life gain advantage. Sword of Body and Mind makes them throw guys in front of yours when they don’t want to because if they don’t you get more dudes. Sword of Feast and Famine forces them into Top Deck mode. Don’t overlook that. Being in Top Deck mode is one of the worst positions to find yourself. You can’t keep any surprises, which usually equates to a loss soon enough. This sword is also pretty bonkers with manlands and other cool nonbasics.

Phyrexian Revoker- An attacking Pithing Needle? Sounds great. It shuts off mana abilities you say? Even better. Eat it Sol Ring. I love cards that solve multiple problems, and in most cases I think this will serve as a colorless Linvala, Keeper of Silence.

Blightsteel Colossus- “Darksteel Who? Nah dog, that ain’t me. I’m One Shot, the Robot.” This card is a strictly better version of his Darksteel cousin. I don’t even care if you think it’s broken. So is half the cube. If anyone lets somebody get this and Tinker, they deserve to lose. I got my foil one, you better get yours.

Gold

Glissa, the Traitor- Wow, what a bomb. This chick kills everything. She makes me want to put in Executioner’s Capsule. This is going to really push people into Black/Green, which makes me happy.

Aside

I really wanted to put Massacre Wurm a.k.a LoL Wurm in, but hes so Black it’s a problem. He might replace Sorin Markov, but it’d be a stretch.

Well, I hope you enjoyed reading my article about a format that doesn’t exist anymore. Scars Scars Besieged is going to be a lot of fun. I can’t wait to play WITHOUT faction packs.  And I hope I provided some insight on why you should add Besieged to YOUR cube.

Thanks

- Chris Mellard
Kingofweasels in the forums

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