Hi again! I wanted to say right off that bat that I appreciated the comments and questions I got on my last article in the forums, and I’m going to answer a question from the forums at the end of this article. But first, I’m going to talk about the implications of thinking of the Cube as a Limited format first and foremost, and then of thinking of it as a set. By necessity, some of what I’m going to say is personal opinion, and I’ll try to be clear when my opinion is controversial among people who Cube.
When I say that I think of the Cube as a Limited format, I mean a couple of things: First, most games should be won with creatures. Occasionally a game will be decided by milling or a planeswalker ultimate, but I can’t think of a deck from my Cube that didn’t intend to win with creatures.
Having enough creatures isn’t a big deal in most colors — but in Blue, it means running creatures where it might seem like another piece of card draw or countermagic might seem stronger. There is a subtle advantage to this strategy; running powerful creatures increases the power level of your other spells, and the number of interesting interactions in the Cube as a whole. Any sort of blink, reanimation, Ninjitsu/rescue effect, and equipment gets stronger, and creatures tend to be much easier to recur than spells. As someone who appreciates the Cube for the diversity of cards, effects, and game states, I love the things that happen when you play creatures with “enters the battlefield” effects rather than the spells that do the same thing.
In some Cubes, you can draft decks that aim to put together a combo to win. I’ll be up front here and say that I don’t intentionally support combo in my Cube, but many people do. (When I say “combo” here, I’m talking about the two-card combos that can occur in the Cube — not fully-fledged combo decks with many more pieces.) To me, combo is not particularly relevant to Limited, and I don’t Cube in order to draft a Constructed deck. Some people do want to recreate a Constructed deck in the Cube (see the Wizards of the Coast Cube for an example of this — Counterbalance, anyone?), but it’s not what I want to get out of the Cube.
I also feel that including cards like Tinker, Entomb, Darksteel Colossus, or Sundering Titan — as in, “cards that require a certain other set of cards to operate” — isn’t conducive to a strong draft, because those cards will just be dead without the supporting pieces. Again, for lots of people that’s a reasonable tradeoff because they want the experience of drafting decks that do those things. If there’s interest, I’ll devote a column in the future to combo in the Cube – let me know in the forums or on Twitter.
Incidental combo is a whole different story. Just by including cards that are otherwise good, the Cube has infinite turns, infinite card draw, and Reveillark combo. There are also things that can be described as “an inappropriate amount of synergy,” such as “an infinitely looping Mulldrifter and Avalanche Riders with Recurring Nightmare.” Those are all really fun to me, but I don’t feel that they have to be the object of a deck. I’m happy to have combos show up in the Cube, but I want every card in my Cube to be good in more than one deck.
The final piece of the puzzle for Limited is that some fraction of your Cube needs to be devoted to utility effects. The most obvious is artifact and enchantment destruction, but I also include graveyard hate and the somewhat more nebulous “ways to deal with tricky creatures.” By that, I mean answers to indestructible and untargetable creatures, in as wide a variety of colors as possible.
The reason utility effects are so important in the Cube is a little bit of a paradox: We play the Cube because we want to play with powerful cards, but (if you’re like me, anyway) you don’t want to win with one broken, unanswered card. I try to balance out the broken stuff with an appropriate amount of hate, which is a fairly trial-by-error process. Let’s break it down by category.
Enchantment and Artifact Destruction
This encompasses a huge number of the broken cards in the Cube, and is probably the most important utility effect to get right. I counted about twenty-five cards in my Cube that answer artifacts or enchantments or both. Some are more efficient and specific (Smash to Smithereens) and others are less so (Mold Shambler, Nevinyrral’s Disk).
As it stands now, each drafter ends up with about two Naturalize effects on average, which is somewhat higher than a “normal” limited set — M11 is more like one per drafter. That increase feels fair, since Umezawa’s Jitte and Survival of the Fittest are so much more problematic than their Core Set counterparts. Sometimes I think that there are still too few cards (particularly when it comes to hitting artifacts), and I imagine that if we do get all three new Darksteel swords in Scars of Mirrodin, I’ll need to find more room.
Whenever possible, I like for these effects to be tacked onto an otherwise playable effect (like a creature or direct damage) or a modal effect (like Aftershock).
Graveyard Hate
As far as I can tell, graveyard hate is fairly uncommon in Cube lists. After adding more reanimation to our Cube about two years ago, I found it necessary. There are also plenty of non-reanimation effects that can use an answer — Tarmogoyf, Genesis, and Spitting Image, to name a few. However, graveyard hate doesn’t need to show up in every draft, because reanimation is generally hard to set up, and the instances where it’s truly problematic aren’t super-common.
We run two dedicated graveyard removal cards (Relic of Progenitus and Scrabbling Claws) and two others that sometimes get the job done (Stonecloaker and Nezumi Graverobber). This seems to be at about the right level, though (as is usual in the Cube) I wouldn’t say no to another Cube playable that had graveyard removal as a bonus.
Flexible Creature Removal
It’s a little strange when you start playing the Cube (or comparing it to other formats, as happened for me) and realize just how different in value removal can become. In the Cube, the density of creatures that are indestructible, untargetable, or have protection from a color is much higher than a normal Limited environment.
As such, effects like Terror get a little less handy, while Bane of the Living gets awesome. Somewhat paradoxically, Wrath of God stays good, but it sometimes functions as spot removal on a Pristine Angel.
Stuffy Doll is one of the most problematic creatures in the Cube if you aren’t in White, but I’ve tried to balance that by hanging onto things like Kagemaro, First to Suffer, Mercy Killing, and Puncture Blast. And sometimes, you know, Balance.
One of the interesting things about the Cube is that mass removal (I’m speaking somewhat loosely here and including things like Barter in Blood and Pyroclasm) are effectively common — they show up just as often as Naturalize effects. I think that’s pretty cool.
As I see it, those are the big implications of the Cube as a Limited format. What about the Cube as a set? There’s some overlap there, but some new themes, too.
Let’s start by talking about color balance — one of the most critical aspects of making sure the Cube plays well. It’s also one of the most difficult, since we are all limited by what Wizards has actually printed. Actually, I had a buddy who would just errata cards for his Cube — things like, “Now Rafiq of the Many has shroud and is playable” — but that’s a ballsy move.
For most of us, balancing colors in the Cube becomes more that just “choose the best cards in each color.” It ends up being more along the lines of “play to the strengths of each color, relative to its problematic matchups.”
For instance, I struggled for a long time with Red seeming to be not quite good enough. There’s a lot of built-in hate for Red — Paladin En-Vec, Silver Knight, first-strikers in general — and a lot of Red’s historically good cards are tribal. In the last year I followed advice from other Cube drafters to add more direct damage, small creatures, and Shatter variants that do something else, and now I feel that Red is much stronger.
In general, I like to outline effects I think nearly every deck of that color should have, and then make sure to include a reasonable quantity of that effect. This is basically how rarity is created in the Cube, and therefore it has a huge impact on how the Cube plays. For example, I’d like approximately every Green deck to have mana ramping, every Blue deck to have card drawing, every White deck to have removal. That part isn’t rocket science.
I also like to figure out what effects are really fun, rare, and/or special in a given color, and do more of that. For red, I like repeatable damage effects like Obsidian Fireheart and (in a completely different class) Sulfuric Vortex. In green, I like card drawing and Wrath of God protection like Genesis, Caller of the Claw, and Masked Admirers.
Finally, I want each color to have its most broken effects — in particular, the cards that feel really unfair. I’m thinking of Balance, Mana Drain, Mind Twist, and Survival of the Fittest. Red is a little bit harder, but I think Avalanche Riders gets the job done. That part gets a little bit more subjective, and I’ve already mentioned that Armageddon is an exception. But a cardinal rule for me is that I’d rather provide answers than remove the problems. Keeping the super-powerful cards in is what makes it the Cube, and as long as you pay attention to providing answers, “broken” doesn’t mean “unfun.”
Another key consideration for a set is curve, and luckily this one is easier to figure out. I like to take a normal set curve as a baseline, and adjust from there. For example, the M11 average creature converted mana cost is 3.6, and my Cube falls at 3.7 (excluding multicolor, which is intentionally skewed higher to make it easier to cast). This is pretty standard for Cubes. However, some Cubes support aggro to a greater degree, and thus have a lower average CMC.
Which brings me to my next topic: what archetypes should your Cube support? For the most part, you don’t have to worry too much about creating archetypes in your Cube, because the color pie does a lot of the work. It’s inevitable that just by including the best cards, your Cube will support U/W and U/B control, Reanimator, and various base White or Green Aggro-to-midrange strategies. The archetypes that demand special care are Aggro and 5-Color Control.
For 5-Color control, the issue tends to be “How strong is too strong?” Evan Erwin focused a recent update specifically on powering down this strategy — and while I don’t necessarily agree with that change entirely, I think the sentiment is a good one.
My experience is that this is highly playgroup dependent. No one I draft with currently is particularly greedy, so I haven’t had to worry about the power level of this strategy. If it does become an issue for you, this archetype should be pretty easy to power down — it’s very vulnerable to land destruction and depends on excellent mana fixing. Increase the former and decrease the later, and you shouldn’t have any trouble adjusting the power level of 5-Color Control to where you want it.
As an aside, I want to point out that multicolor in and of itself doesn’t determine how your Cube plays. People occasionally look at my Cube and think that because I run a lot of multicolor (I do) that it is either dominant, or that the amount of multicolor weakens draft pack. The reason why that isn’t true is twofold — first, since I don’t just shuffle my Cube together to make packs, I actually feel that I have a very fine-tuned control over how much multicolor shows up per drafter (currently about 8%).
Secondly, part of the multicolor in my Cube is hybrid, which plays out completely differently. Hybrid actually focuses your decks towards one or two colors, and is very easy to play. In fact, hybrid cards are the most-played cards in my Cube after artifacts. I see hybrid as a critical tool towards building consistent decks when you draft with only a few people. I’ll step off my soapbox here, but I do think it’s important that the way your playgroup plays can be just as important as the actual contents of your Cube.
But back to aggro — the most aggressive deck in my Cube is R/W, which gets the early beaters, additional clocks like Sulfuric Vortex, and the burn and cheap removal to seal the deal. Other color combinations in my Cube can function like aggro, albeit more slowly, by using land or hand disruption to stop the opponent from setting up. I see a deck like B/R with lots of discard or Land Destruction fitting into this category, even though the deck might curve out with a Demigod of Revenge or Thunderblust, and thus technically be a bit higher end. Supporting aggro at a higher level is more of a commitment, and one I don’t choose to make.
I’m definitely in the minority here, so let me explain why, and then I’ll point you to an excellent Cube list that emphasizes aggressive decks.
It’s accepted wisdom that in order to support aggro in the Cube, you need to:
1) Include many more creatures that fit into aggro decks than not, including some that are only good in aggro, and
2) Dial down the power level of other strategies (for example, by cutting the Signets to make midrange decks slower).
While neither of those things are crazy, they’re not what I want to do in my Cube. I specifically don’t like to include cards that are extremely deck-dependent, and I think that it should raise some questions when you have to do so much to make a given deck work.
That’s not to say that aggro is bad in general, but it’s clearly the strategy that suffers the most from losing redundancy in a singleton format. My feeling is that as long as control is kept in check, aggro is probably at an acceptable level.
With that said, what exactly that means will certainly vary from person to person, and it’s very common in Cube design to shift that balance further towards aggro and away from control. For example, Usman Jamil Cube is one I really like where a lot of effort has been made to ensure that aggro is supported. I recommend you check it out if an emphasis on aggressive decks is more your style.
Another note about aggro: I’ve found that without really planning for it, U/B aggro has become a relevant strategy in my Cube. The combination of cheap evasive dudes (like the Dauthi shadow creatures and Inkfathom Infiltrator) with bounce has made for some very effective decks. It isn’t quite as consistent as other Cube archetypes, but I like it as an example of what happens when you draft good cards without feeling pigeonholed into control because you are drafting blue (or vice versa).
One thing I want to reiterate is that I definitely won’t be speaking for everyone who Cubes in this column, all the time. I’ll do my best to present the reasons for my opinions, and to direct my readers (you!) to dissenting opinions if I can. But I think I can say more interesting things by presenting my thoughts rather than those of a homogenized robot, and I hope that debate and discussion will be just as valuable as anything I could say.
Finally, I wanted to answer a question from allanhowls in the forums (but where everyone will get a chance to read it!)
“Thea, I’d be interested in hearing more about your two-person drafts. How many packs of what size do you deal out, how do you execute the actual draft, etc.
“My girlfriend and I have tried a few variations, but I’d like to hear what you’ve tried for those of us whose playgroup is usually limited to two.”
I’m glad to get a chance to talk about this topic!
First, I would say that when you start Cubing with someone who isn’t familiar with the Cube, regardless of their experience with Magic, I like to start with Sealed deck. It’s by far the easiest way to give advice (or have a third person do so), since all of their decisions can be discussed. But that doesn’t sound like it’s the case with you and your girlfriend.
The Draft format I’ve been happiest with for two people is Winston Draft. Winston Draft emulates a normal Booster Draft fairly well — it preserves the existence of hate drafting, signals, and the feeling of seeing some but not all of the cards your opponent takes.
When we draft, we construct the card pool (not packs, but just a stack of cards) like this: the Cube is kept divided into nine sections. I randomly take eleven cards from the mono-colored, artifact, and hybrid sections, and eight each from multicolor and land. I then roll a few d20s to add eight additional cards from random sections. Shuffle them together, and you’re good to draft!
You can definitely mess with those numbers to get the power level and balance you are looking for. I’ve found that those numbers about right to consistently have two- (or two-plus-a-splash-color) decks. If you want to allow mono-colored decks with two people, you’re either going to need to draft with more cards or get very lucky.
I really love this draft format. The flexibility you get in terms of dialing in the power level is really cool, and it’s very fast since decisions are basically “yes or no?”
On more thing – after we draft, we sort our decks by color into a “used” section, and then take any cards we didn’t run and return them to their respective piles for the next draft. That’s probably more a psychological thing than anything, but I used to hate to see a card I really love like Pernicious Deed get sorted away because I couldn’t run it. This way, it feels like you see more cards and get to do more drafts before shuffling everything back together.