Build Your Cube Backwards

Tuition

Egann

7 April 2016

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If you're building your first cube, you're probably going to feel like I did: overwhelmed. 360 unique cards is a huge number. I confess, I panicked and threw together 360 random cards from my collection I thought would be fun to play with. A few hiccups aside, it worked great, but I can show you how to do better.

My last cube I built backwards. Instead of working from a collection to a set of cards, I started with a card, then formed a shopping list around it. My playgroup tells me my first cube wasn't bad, but they also say they like this one a lot better.

This is how I built my cube backwards.

Step 1: Start With a Card You Love and Build a Singleton Deck Around It

I started with Krark's Thumb. I love this card, but I've never been able to make a deck around it which could work. Well, today your luck is gonna change, thumb!

A quick search on Magiccards.info shows there are about 60 cards I can use. Of these, perhaps 20 cards catch my personal tastes. Fiery Gambit? Nice. Creepy Doll? Awesome. There's even a card which can play second fiddle for the thumb; Goblin Bookie. It's not legal in any format, but that doesn't matter in cube, now does it!

I don't like enough of them, however, to build a deck dedicated to coin flips, and certainly not enough to reliably draft all of them. But don't worry; that's actually a blessing in disguise.

Step 2: Build A Few More Singleton Decks Which Draft Well Against It (and each other)

I don't know if there's a technical word for this, but when I say “drafting against” I mean two players, drafting for notably different deck archetypes, can both use the same card. Maybe not the archetype-defining cards like the thumb or Flickerwisp, but certainly solid B-list mainboard cards.

Let's look at a concrete example. Creepy Doll fits nicely in the thumb deck. It's a bit mana expensive, but an affinity deck might run it, too, and a deck splashed into too many colors may want it as a safe colorless creature to play.

That dynamic of “you took my card!” is what makes for a memorable draft environment. It means that, while your archetypes may exist in an abstraction, the practical forces and randomization of the draft will splice together all sorts of hybrid deck strategies. No two draft decks will be alike, even if they come from the same cube, and if you did your homework right, they will all have good internal synergy.

Step 3: Round the Cube Out and Playtest

At this point, you can pad out the remainder of the cube with cards from your collection. While most first-time cubes I've seen can avoid jank, almost all of them need some collection padding. There's no harm in replacing them later when you have a better idea what your cube needs.

Random Suggestions And Opinions

My group has found conspiracies to be anticlimactic. I can't say for sure that your group won't like them, but they're going to all get dropped from my cubes in the next few revisions.

Even if the conspiracy cards are useless, the draft-altering artifact creature cards from Conspiracy are amazing. I just about cried when my AEther Searcher paired to an Angelic Skirmisher—she's one of my favorite junk rares of all time, especially in limited—and we all had a laugh when a player forgot we change directions in draft and used Whispergear Sneak to look at the wrong pack.

Canal Dredger in particular deserves a nod as an unsung hero of cube. Not only does it collect the worst cards of your cube, but it also tells you which colors and strategies players are avoiding. FANTASTIC self-diagnostic tool.

Keep a written log for the winning and losing decks of each draft—be sure to list the archetypes used, not just colors!—so you can fix colors or color combinations which break the cube's competitiveness. Here's my cube log's last draft results:

Draft from 2-10-2016: Five player draft.

Winner: Corrupt Gambler / Token Populate in Mardu colors. (BRw). 3-1 record. Only deck in draft running black as a major color.

Loser: Landfall midrange with heavy control elements in Naya (UWg). 0-4 record. New Player. Did not draft enough creatures.

Dredges: Round 3: Vampire Hexmage, Marang River Skeleton, Sluiceway Scorpion, Suncrusher, Helium Squirter. Indicates players were avoiding black and heavy color saturation. Fix Black.

Personal Opinion: I don't like the ABUR Duals for cube. Yes, they are utterly amazing cards, and I would totally run them in every commander deck ever if I could afford a full set. The problem is they're too amazing: they don't make your players make tough choices like shocks, scrys, or even filters do, and gameplay is built by making hard decisions.

A word on power level; I, personally, don't make powered cubes and think twice about using a card on a banlist. My objective is first and foremost to provide dynamic and unique gameplay, not to simulate the feeling of a six year old playing with a neutron bomb. But that's just me.

Draft is a pretty self-stabilizing format. At the end of the day, the players are the ones responsible for the decks they made with your cube, and packs and players make a supply and demand curve. So long as you follow a solid cube template, you will almost certainly wind up with a functional cube. Heck, I'm not even sure you need to follow cube templates that closely; my first cube had blue over-represented by 4 and white under-represented by 2. My current cube follows it's template tightly and has three duplicates in it—oops!—I don't think anyone besides me has noticed.