Squaring the Circle

by magicmakrel

Disappointed with the state of constructed play, I built a cube for drafting. Having played Magic the Gathering on and off for roughly 17 years, I have enough cards from a wide variety of sources to build a cube.

I chose to build a 540 card cube which I felt would provide a reasonable amount of variance and still be manageable. My cube is a basic five color Magic cube. I declined to include multicolored cards for two reasons. Multicolored cards are harder to design and play around and my collection of multicolored cards is not balanced enough. Half jokingly, I admit that a modest collection of around 8,300 cards is barely enough to build a 540 card cube. Still, I am lucky to still have those cards after some of my past experiences.

Aside from multicolored cards, I did not include any planeswalkers. If I were ever to include planeswalkers, I would want one planeswalker per color. I currently only own two planeswalkers, so including planeswalkers is out of the question. Whether I ever decide to include a planeswalker is unclear as I have never really grown attached to them as cards.

I opted simply to use the basic guildgates as my cube land base. They are inexpensive and provide about the right number of lands for a 540 card deck. I opted to add 5 extra manafixing artifacts (Myr) rather than the 5 additional lands for fixing purposes.

In any event, my hope is that the cube will be balanced for players and provide them with great drafts irrespective of the colors they choose. I tried to strike a balance between utilizing some of the best cards I own with some of more ordinary and overlooked sleepers that might make for fun drafting.

There are a lot of tools that can help a person build a cube over the course of a weekend. I’ve been using Deckbox.org to manage my inventory (though I use Mtgvault for deckbuilding). There are also sites like Cubedrafting.com that have handy spreadsheets and beginner’s guides to help provide additional cube building frameworks.

In building my cube, I did have to make some additional purchases to ensure that the cube had some quality cards in each color. In doing so, I deviated from my past practice of not spending more than $1 for a card on about four cards. I spent upwards of $1.50 each on around 4 cards. The reason I opted to break the $1 barrier is to provide my drafters with a better experience and balance my cube. Because it is a draft, all players have access to the same card base and therefore, the threat that the game degenerates into a form of pay to win dominance is negligible. This also allowed me to include some of the most valuable cards in my collection in building the cube without worrying about game imbalances. My cube is effectively a community pool.

The first draft was a bit rough logistically, but I managed to round up five guinea pigs for my efforts. I feel that the draft would have gone smoother had I pre-shuffled the cards before arriving. It would also be nice if I took to the time to pre-package the cards in aluminum foil to avoid any drafting confusion with pack selection.

I was lucky to have 5 people draft, although 2 players eventually dropped owing to other commitments. It is not always easy to find a group of casual players as many players burned out on broken EDH decks and the almost monolithic constructed formats (Gruul Aggro anyone?). Most players felt the draft was fun and agreed they would draft my cube again. It’s nice to have a game in which people play for fun rather than just for prizes. I thanked everyone for playing.

Overall, I enjoyed designing and playing a cube and found it an inexpensive and fun alternative to drafting. The response of the players indicates that they are more comfortable with a cube draft than alternative formats such as Captain’s matches in my current area.

Apparently, cube drafts can be sanctioned by stores and players can earn 1 paltry planeswalker points if they manage to build a cube and find seven other players to cube draft in a sanctioned event. Given the rather generous collection necessary for cube building and logistics involved in cube drafting, I should think Wizards would provide people with some real planeswalkers points. I have no real use for planeswalker points anyway, but feel it would be a nice symbolic reward. As it stands, WOTC seems to place little value on deep design exercises or community driven Magic.

I am extremely happy to have acquired many of my Magic cards at much lower prices over the last few years. The current prices in singles are not friendly to players and I will be investing my time in other gaming enterprises. Many of the other people I played with are involving themselves with their own game-making endeavors and I myself have decided to invest more time and energy in my own artistic projects.

Update: Cube drafting is a more social MTG experience and provides players with equal access to the card pool. Cubes can be designed with balance and are relatively cheap to put together. I like having access to limited play without having to pay for it constantly. The hardest part about cubes is simply finding players who are willing to play for fun in a balanced environment. I often cannot find people willing to play.