Pattern Recognition #384 - Cube

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

2 October 2025

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

CUBE! The best of the Worst or the Worst of the Best? Yeah, I know, a bit click-baity, but so what? It can be both!

The reason why I chose this article this week was thanks to one of the Lorwyn Eclipsed spoiler cards that is the 29th World Championship card for Jean-Emmanuel Depraz. First, a congratulations to that person for their win. Well done. Second, and sadly my efforts to find a source for this comment have failed as my source was unable to backtrack their source, one of the criteria for this card to be designed around was that they wanted a card that would play well in their Cube.

Unlike other people I can name, at least this person had enough sense that when given the opportunity to design a card, did so with the expectation that it was to make the game more enjoyable and fun.

But that's that, and this is this! This! is! Cube!

Cube is a player-based constructed format that seeks to emulate the semi-randomness of Limited while providing the players with a much more curated experience. To better explain, your basic Cube is 360 cards, enough for each of eight players to select 15 cards at random, draft them like a regular pack, and then repeat this process twice more for three virtual packs each. And I use 'virtual' to indicate that the 'pack' doesn't exist like something you unwrap nor is it digital. It's a random set of 15 cards that is treated as a pack to be spread around the draft table.

At it's core, that's it. It's just a draft set. For drafting. So what makes a Cube so special?

Well, the first and most important thing is that it's not actually a draft set. It is a preconstructed set of cards that are not limited to a single set, or a single block. A Cube is designed by the people who are going to play it. This is its best strength and its worst weakness.

Now, I won't get into all the details about how to build a Cube, but from my experience and the suggested reading a Cube of 360 cards is divided roughly into 6 equal sections. One for each colour and the sixth for multi-color cards and colorless artifacts. Colored artifacts go into their own color section. There is no duplication limit in a Cube Draft, and I've seen lists that are pure singleton to a few that have up to eight copies of a card in the understanding that in this case, everyone will have a chance to get it. For some reason, Sol Ring jumps to mind thanks to its ubiquity and common reprint status. There is no right or wrong answer to this point, just opinion.

From there, the Draft is treated as a normal draft, with all the skill and technique that go into that format.

At its best, a Cube Draft is amazingly tight experience, with no dead cards, no poor choices, no unanswerable problems. It's a selection of cards chosen from top to bottom to be a excellent play experience in which no matter what you do, you're going to have fun.

You know, as I'm writing this, it occurs to me that some of the Modern Masters sets were intended to replicate the feel of a Cube Draft. They were sets intended to be drafted as part of their advertising works, and they were also intended to be a sort of 'Greatest Hits' collection to encourage people to buy packs even if they didn't get a box to draft. The end results of that are something else entirely, but in retrospect I can sort of see a pattern here. But it's a low chance, I think.

But back to the subject at hand, Cubing!

Designing a set for drafting is not easy. Those of you who are (im)patiently waiting for the return of Sole, it's coming! Eventually! I promise! But one of things I have to keep thinking about in the back of my mind is how the set will play as a Draft. The commons not only need to be relatively simple, but they also need to be something that people won't reject out of hand. Not the greatest, but on-theme and on target for what they do. I know, I sound like I'm repeating myself here but there's a point!

What a Cube Draft does is optimize this sort of experience as the set doesn't have to support that sort of thing. It doesn't have to fit into a single set, so you can pick and choose cards from all across Magic history to work together perfectly fine. Want a Cube that has a heavy Mana Dork population? There is nothing stopping you from putting five copies of Llanowar Elves, Fyndhorn Elves, Elvish Mystic and Noble Hierarch into your Cube.

But it's not just the basics! A Cube can have a very curated bunch of high-power and high-level cards in it as well. I've played flipped through a Planeswalker heavy cube, and it was expected that each player would be able to draft 3-5 walkers for their deck viably. There were 50 of them! Some repeats, obviously, but it was interesting to see a Draftable set that wasn't War of the Spark that was so 'Walker heavy.

And here is where I shift gears to the bad thing about Cube.

It's a subjective thing. Very subjective. Highly Subjective. What's good for the goose most definitely is NOT good for the gander. What one person or group thinks is the way to play the game is not the way that others might see it, or be able to.

I've been burned on a Cube in this manner, so if you'll forgive storytime, it's story time. I got to play a Cube and when I asked to look over the card selection, I was allowed, no problem. Thanks for sharing! I saw a few pieces that I instantly latched onto as good options and set about going through the draft, helping shuffle the cards and preparing the 'packs'. Draft starts happening and my card pool is less than ideal. But I pull enough cards, and I make a fairly janky deck that has very little synergy, but some decent goodstuff. We start to play, and wow do I get my ass kicked. I wasn't able to get my feet under me, not able to generate value and my answers were often too little and too late.

It may also explain my horrible aversion to 2.5 and 3 color decks in Limited, come to think of it.

So after the games were done, and we all talked, I was asked what was up with my deck. So I put out my cards, explained my choices, and I was asked by the guy whose Cube it was, "Well why didn't you draft card name? That's what it's there for."

"I didn't see it," I answered truthfully.

"Well, that's not how that's supposed to be played. You're supposed to use X and Y in those colors, and you don't have either. You did it wrong."

Turns out, this particular Cube wasn't... let's put this politely... not really a draft set, and more 8 limited decks squished together with a bit of filler and redundancy around them. They built the Cube as these decks, and if you weren't playing one of those decks, you were playing it wrong. And you were expected to know what those 8 decks were going in. I didn't. I saw other options that didn't pan out.

It's stuck we me, that line. Playing it Wrong. I suppose that's one of the reasons why I hate New Phyrexia.

A Cube that is poorly designed isn't really a draft set. At best, it's a large pile of jank cards put together by a person or persons who think 'This is COOL' and have the most basic understanding of what a Cube is and how Drafting works. They load their deck up with amazing and powerful cards and combos and great sets of dual lands and then they sit down to play it with their friends and it's a complete mess. Nothing works, nothing plays well, and they don't understand why.

A Cube, for all is special considerations, is still a full set. 360 cards, even if you account for duplicates, is actually larger than a lot of sets nowadays. Building a Cube is building a full expansion set, with additional filler in and around the core notions of the draft archetypes.

So if you're going to build a Cube for yourself, check yourself ahead of time, and check out how Wizards builds their sets. Last year with Foundations I went over the nature of the various Signpost Uncommons, and how they helped shaped and guide the deckbuilding for the set and for the Standard format moving forward for the next few years.

Consider starting there, with the middle of the set. Find your build around cards and build outward from them, and to act as signposts, but not limiting chokers on the rest of the set. Find some concept or idea to build up from and not down to and see for yourself how hard building a set can be.

Or just throw together 60 cards from each colour into a pile, a whole lot of mana fixing and enjoy the chaos that unfolds. That can work too!

It will be hard. Listen to feedback and never assume you're incapable of making mistakes. But a good cube can be fun to play with. A bad one will ruin everyone's day.

But isn't that true of all sets?

Thank you all for watching and reading, and I'll see you all next week!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!