I still remember the first game of Commander I ever played.
It was called Elder Dragon Highlander back then, and it was still mostly just a brainchild of the judge community. Lucky for me, I was very good friends with a judge: current Level 3 mastermind Eric Levine. I quickly threw together a couple of decks—Dromar, the Banisher and Darigaaz, the Igniter—that were full of splashy spells and had no synergy at all. He blew me out with a pile of durdle spells like Heat Shimmer and I was immediately hooked.
EDH was well-established by the time Wizards released their official Commander products in the summer of 2011. A card like Mana Reflection, which had been a fifty-cent rare for ages, was already up into the $4-$5 range. But a rising tide lifts all ships, and the release of the Commander decks still brought a boon to the prices of staples in that format. The official Commander decks cemented the format in the eyes of many players, and introduced it to tons of others. Mana Reflection retails for $7.99 now and I don’t see it going down anytime soon.
The official Magic Online Cube seems to be a similar game-changer.
For years, cubes have been the last bastion of the crazed collector and the Limited freak. Sizes vary and card choices change, but the general idea is usually the same: What happens when you draft a set where every card is among the most powerful ever printed?
Recently, however, cube design has evolved into so much more. There are articles all over the internet that offer up wisdom on proper color balancing and synergy. Slowly but surely, cubes have started to grow from a pile of awesome cards into a living, breathing, Magic set that is both fun and balanced to draft.
Of course, the beauty of cube is that it isn’t just another Magic set—you can do what you want with it. Love Mirrodin block? Make an artifact cube. Have a hankering for Lorwyn? There’s a tribal cube for that. I’ve seen morph cubes, pauper cubes, crap cubes, powered cubes, single-set block cubes, combo cubes, and dozens of other permutations. Cube is like deckbuilding on a grand scale—the Minecraft of Magic, if you will. Flexibility is built into its DNA.
But what happens now that there is an ‘official’ cube people can use as their starting point? Will cube design become static, or will it remain as dynamic as ever? And what will that mean for the prices of cube staples—are we due for an increase in price, or is building a high-octane cube in paper Magic too expensive to affect much? Will we ever get customizable cubes online? What about a gold-bordered cube released by Wizards? Most importantly, will the online price for TPF packs ever recover?
If 2011 was the year of Commander, 2012 is the year of the cube. Let’s figure out what that means to the world of Magic finance.
The Standardizing of Cube Size
The smallest size a cube can be is 360—the number of cards you need to support a single eight-man draft. Most of the bigger cubes contain 720 cards—enough for two full eight-man drafts. The Magic Online Cube is 720, which guarantees that you’ll only see a given card about half the time you draft.
For a while, most cubes were clocking in somewhere in the ~550 range, which allows for variety without having to deal with an overwhelming number of cards. I’d imagine that 720 will be cemented in as the new standard now that Wizards has thrown their weight behind that number, however.
Size impacts cube in a major way. For example, mono-red (and aggro in general) is stronger in smaller cards because all its spells want to do essentially the same thing. The smaller the cube, the more likely you are to get the best of them every time. In larger cubes where the power level is somewhat diluted, planeswalkers are at their most powerful.
Over time, this will probably balance out. More cards are printed every year, and there are design steps you can take to make aggro work in a big cube. But if you are looking to analyze trends in what cards are essential to the current trends in cube design, make sure to pay attention to 720-card lists and what plays well in a bigger sandbox.
What’s a ‘Cube Staple,’ Anyway?
“Hey Chas,” you might ask me, especially if you were kind of dense. “You just got done telling me that cubes have a ton of variety. If this is true, how can there be cube staples?”
“Well, Lawrence,” I would respond, “every format ever has a bunch of different decks. That doesn’t mean there aren’t staples.”
Cube is no different. Aside from the truly wacky cubes—tribal, bulk rare, etc. —most cubes follow similar rules and play similar cards.
The best place to go for cube research is eidolon232’s cube comparison thread in the MTGSalvation forums. So far, he’s compared about a hundred cubes and published the results. If you go check it out, you’ll quickly see that many of the same cards keep showing up time and again.
I would define the following cards as cube staples, even though you won’t see them in every single cube:
White
Blue
Black
Red
Green
Gold
Fire / Ice
Artifact
Lands
The Onslaught Fetchlands
The Original Dual Lands
The Ravnica Shocklands
The Worldwake Manlands
The Zendikar Fetchlands
These are the cards that can be found in roughly 75% of standard cubes. By and large, these are the cards that are ‘expected’ to be in a cube. If yours doesn’t have them, people will probably ask you why.
The MTGO cube hasn’t had an effect on this list yet, but it will. As more and more results flow in from online cube matches, people have begun to realize that there are some pretty major weaknesses in the way most cubes are built.
In standard cubes, the two dominant strategies are usually at the extreme opposite ends of the spectrum. Mono-red is almost always the strongest aggressive deck, and the other best deck at the table is usually some kind of blue control deck with multiple splashes and a ton of planeswalkers. Beyond that, a range of fast mana/synergy decks that take advantage of multiple combos and things like early Mind Twists tend to rack up the wins. Most other deck choices are firmly entrenched in the second tier.
The Wizards cube made a few attempts at introducing other archetypes into the fray. They took out much of the artifact mana and gave that role to green, where many of the color’s aggressive drops were replaced with ramp spells. Black was given a mono-black aggro/midrange identity, and a storm deck was roughly scattered into a couple colors as well.
So far, the additions given to green have been a success. People have begun to realize that speeding up their mana production is just about the most powerful thing you can do in cube. I expect to see ramp become a more permanent addition to green’s cube arsenal, and I expect to see fewer signets and more Rampant Growths in standard lists.
The other two additions to the MTGO cube didn’t work so well. I don’t think a storm deck can work in that cube even if you rotisserie drafted the entire thing. Even more importantly, black’s identity as ‘the problematic cube color’ has finally gotten some mainstream attention. I’m not sure what can be done about it, but right now fixing black is the number one goal of most people I know who are avid cubers.
The best fixes I’ve seen involve making black more of a control color and culling away cards like Vampire Interloper and Diregraf Ghoul while tuning white toward a more aggressive path. That said, I haven’t had a chance to play with a cube that’s done much in the way of radical strategy shifting, so to me this remains an open issue.
I also expect this lift will change as more people realize that some of the cards need to go because they’re inherently unfun (Mind Twist) or a relic from an earlier age (Masticore). I’m not saying those cards will disappear from cubes entirely, but they’ll likely go the way of Sol Ring—if you’re including the card in your list, you should understand what it’s going to do to your environment.
How Cube Impacts Card Value
On the financial side, most of these cube staples have their values strongly tied to other formats already. Cards like Sword of Fire and Ice are already in demand thanks to Commander, and the Revised dual lands retain value thanks to their Legacy playability.
So far, cube has only impacted the price of cards in a few subtle ways, but it’s important to note them nonetheless.
Cube-Only Cards
There aren’t too many of these, and they’re usually corner cases like Upheaval and Kokusho, where a card is banned in Commander but awesome in cube. One can probably make a successful argument that kitchen table Magic and nostalgia prop these cards up just as much as cube does, but knowing that they’re important in another format certainly makes them easier to trade.
Cube-Only Foils
This mostly applies to cards like Sulfuric Vortex—aggressive cards that don’t see much (if any) play in Commander but are still too slow for Modern or Legacy. Sulfuric Vortex really only sees play in cube, where it’s pretty much an auto-include. Thanks to that, it’s sold out here at $15.99 and I wouldn’t trade one for less than $20.
Pauper Cube Foils
With the price of making an all-foil cube sitting comfortably in the $5,000+ range, many people have resorted to ‘pauper’ cubes where every card is a common. Invariably, many people who make these end up deciding to foil them out. After all, foil commons are cheap, right?
For the most part, this has remained true. However, it can still be hard for people to track these down locally. I’ve made some awesome trades giving up 2-3 pauper cube foils in exchange for a sweet Standard staple.
Original Set Foils
If you really want make your cube look great, consider forgoing promo and reprint foils in exchange for the ‘real’ thing. This is what I did in making my cube, and I discovered that many others share in my insanity. For example, check the price of a Fifth Dawn foil Eternal Witness (sold out at $19.99) compared to the FNM version (sold out at $9.99). Check out a foil Akroma, Angel of Wrath from Legions ($29.99) versus one from Time Spiral ($17.99). Sometimes people are just paying for the expansion symbol; consider the price difference between a Saviors of Kamigawa foil Pithing Needle ($19.99), 10th edition ($9.99), and Magic 2010 ($5.99).
Alpha/Beta Cards
Cube is an excellent place to put beautiful copies of pet Alpha/Beta cards that don’t really fit anywhere else. A NM Beta Mind Twist, for example, still retails at $149.99 even though it’s almost never played in Vintage anymore. Cube is a huge part of why these cards are still in serious demand.
A Gold-Bordered Cube?
During the cube’s inaugural weekend on MTGO, the Twitterverse was abuzz with idle speculation over the possibility of buying a copy of the official list straight from Wizards of the Coast. When asked how much people would pay for such a thing, dollar figures got as high as $250!
From 1997 to 2005, Wizards released gold-bordered versions of the top four decks from that year’s World Championship. For years, these decks were often a novice deck builder’s only glimpse into how a ‘real’ Magic deck functions.
I’m not 100% sure why Wizards stopped printing gold-bordered decks, but I’d guess it had more to do with reduced sales than anything else. These cards never affected the secondary market value of tournament legal cards whatsoever, and their fan base was very small. I still occasionally see a gold-bordered Force of Will in someone’s binder or Commander deck, but for the most part these cards have been lost into the bulk of a million different collections.
Would Wizards go back to the gold-bordered well eight years later to help promote cube? It’s doubtful. Cube is an inherently confusing concept, and it has a radically different audience than the Commander and Archenemy products. The fact that you need at least six people to hold a draft is a problem as well. Realistically, its audience would be more in line with that of the From the Vaults series, except that making a cube would require printing up 720 unique cards.
Such a product would likely have to cost around a hundred dollars, and it wouldn’t sell well. Only the most dedicated Magic players would buy it, and even there it would likely be a loss for Wizards since those players would be drafting for free instead of cracking more packs.
Mostly, I think a Wizards-made gold-bordered cube would lead to a bunch of confused children getting ‘that Magic game’ under the tree at Christmas. “You have to do what? With how many people?”
If a gold-bordered cube were printed, I doubt it would affect the price of cube staples at all. People like to customize their cubes anyway, and if you look at the disparity of foil vs. non-foil prices anyway you’ll get a good sense of how important aesthetics are to people who make cubes. I think that a gold-bordered cube would mostly just serve to make the format more accessible (a good thing) while giving the proxy crew access to more original duals and fetchlands for their Commander decks (a debatable thing). So even though I don’t think it’s likely to happen, I’m in favor of it.
Are Individual Cubes Coming to MTGO?
The announcement of the Magic Online cube was initially met with a tepid response.
Most of the cube community was happy that something resembling cube would soon hit MTGO, but it wasn’t the vision we all wanted: the ability to run our own events with our own cubes whenever we wanted. Cube, after all, is about format-building. Drafting the Wizards cube, people argued, was probably going to be fun—but it wasn’t real cubing.
The problem with allowing individual cubes, of course, is that they are hard to monetize. Paying Wizards of the Coast seven dollars to draft their cube is one thing, but having the ability to run your own drafts is quite different. What sort of entry fee would be reasonable for that. Heck, they’re your cards, right? How could they charge you much more than, say, a Constructed tournament?
Wizards understands that a vast number of MTGO users are just there to draft. They drop $40 on tickets, buy some packs, sell whatever they win/open, and reload their account when they run out of money. That’s all they do. Why would they give those people a far cheaper alternative that is infinitely customizable? You wouldn’t even need to own any cards yourself—you could simply enter a cube event run by someone else.
I do believe that Wizards will implement this feature one day, but it’s probably a long way off. Right now, they’re keeping cube fresh by only allowing us to draft it four times a year—a smart move that will lead to non-stop queues firing during those tiny windows of opportunity. While allowing people to build their own cubes and paying, say, five tickets to draft with them may seem like a winning proposition in the short term, it would take a lot of time to correctly implement and it’s doubtful that it would make them money over the long haul.
That said, cube staples are criminally undervalued online. Very few people play casually on MTGO, so Commander and cube cards can be found for next to nothing. If such an announcement is ever made, foil staples will go up 2000% overnight.
Cubes and Prize Packs
During MTGO’s first cube weekend, the prize payout was exclusively done in Innistrad and Dark Ascension packs. A ton of these events fired, and pack values for those sets plummeted about half a ticket each. Because DII was the current draft format, however, the market rebounded almost immediately. Buying your packs on the eve of the final cube night—when the market was at its most saturated—would have made you some easy money.
The second cube weekend paid out in Time Spiral block packs. In the future, Wizards has said they will be paying out in whatever the current ‘retro’ draft format is, so I expect we’ll be seeing a similar phenomenon next time as well.
Just like with the Innistrad block packs, the rush to cube draft completely tanked the market for these. Unlike Innistrad, though, Time Spiral prices have remained fairly low. They’ve rebounded somewhat—sets were down to around 6 tickets each and they’re back up to 8 each or so—but nix tix drafts simply don’t fire all that often. Thus, the price is likely going to remain low for these until the next time they come around as the retro draft format of the week.
There is some money to be made here buying these packs directly from drafters during the height of a cube week. It won’t get you rich, but simply supply and demand will tell you that it’s an almost guaranteed profit.
A Few Final Thoughts on Cube
Several years ago, I started building a cube that would become my shining achievement as a Magic collector. I wanted to put one together that contained a full 720 cards and highlighted foil copies of all the coolest cards in Magic history. This task is what drove my trading for months on end, and working on my cube has been one of the most satisfying projects I’ve ever worked on.
What I love about my cube is that it is something I will always be able to keep and enjoy in a hundred different ways. A time will come when I will likely stop going to FNMs and playing regularly—probably when I start a family—and it will be nice to be able to bust out the cube every so often and draft my favorite cards. Nothing Wizards does to the game can ever change my cube unless I want it to, and as someone who is often slow to embrace change I like having that as a security blanket. I also enjoy that I can invite friends over to draft even if they’ve been out of the game for a while and don’t have a collection anymore—cube is universal in its appeal.
There is a downside to having a truly nice cube, of course. The darned thing has gone up in value fivefold since I started building it, mostly thanks to Commander, and most of the decks people make each week contain a thousand dollars worth of foils. This means that I can’t really travel with my cube, and I no longer allow people to eat or drink during a draft.
It’s a little sad that prices have gotten to the point where it’s almost a liability to have a nice cube. I love having it as a collector’s piece—and I’m always excited to show it off—but most of the time I simply play with a friend’s cube that is half proxied and has a Goblin Guide in it that got run over by a car. Why? Because I can scarf Chinese food and slam cards around while playing with that cube and I can’t with mine.
If you’re making a sweet cube, I recommend having another one as well that you don’t mind getting a little beat up. It’s a bummer to pass up chances to play with your cube just because the circumstances are too risky. A foil cube is like a nice suit—you can’t wear it to the beach.
What will the Wizards cube do to card values? I don’t imagine it’ll change much, though some cards that were harder to trade away before will be easier to move now because more people are building cubes. I’d imagine a lot of people will start out trying to foil out their cube too, but I can tell you from experience that it’s a hard road ahead.
I do think there will be more pressure for people to conform their cube to the official list, but by and large I think cube will remain a brewer’s format. As long as the Magic Online Cube remains far behind amateur lists in terms of balance and innovation, people will continue to play cube how they see fit.
Which is how it should be.
Until next time —
— Chas Andres