Breaking Singleton

By Shamim |

At its core, a Cube is a a custom draft environment built by a designer to simulate their intended gameplay experience. This can range from powered cubes where you play with 25 years worth of the best offerings from Wizards, themed cubes based on a given block to recapture the feeling of a limited environment, or wildly explorative builds that let a person try out all the manner of combinations and see what comes about. There's no wrong way to cube; there are no hard and fast rules to designing a cube.

Have you ever dove deep into gathering pieces as you flesh out an archetype, got close to realizing your vision, but then couldn't cross the finish line? Didn't quite end up where you imagined? Thinking to yourself man, I really wish I had a second version of this effect to really tie everything together. It would make things so much easier than having to mess around with jank like Sarcomancy just to hit another aggressive zombie body to make Gravecrawler worth it. Well, why not just double up on Gravecrawler itself?

Breaking singleton is something that had long been considered taboo within the cube community, but has gained greater traction in recent years with more designers willing to dip their toes into these forbidden waters. When utilized with a clear goal in mind, doubling up on a given card can enrich and introduce gameplay elements that may have been more difficult to achieve otherwise.

I know what you may be thinking: But cube is a singleton format?

To that, I raise the question: What is your intended goal for your cube?

Are you trying to play by some "rule" that the community has accepted at large, or are you trying to create a more fun and immersive gameplay experience for your players? If going up to two copies of a card in your collection of 360+ cards manages to do that by enriching the gameplay by introducing new interactions, then go for it! I can assure you that aside from yourself poring over your list online and cursing an imperfect ratio, that absolutely no one will care (or really notice) as long as they had a fun time playing. I've been doing this for 6+ years now and I've never had one complaint from a drafter. Just a quick 10 second PSA explaining any unique quirk(s) is usually enough to get the idea across to your players (stickers and identifiers on inner sleeves also help!) and they're more than game for a fun night of cubing.

From the very beginning when I first built my cube around Spring 2014, I wasn't shy about doubling up on cards when I felt like they made a difference in my environment. To that end I doubled up on Fetchlands and Shocklands to create an environment with a rich assortment of fixing, tribal leaning one drop cards like Gravecrawler and Champion of the Parish to bolster and give an identity to aggressive strategies, and also the likes of Brainstorm and Birthing Pod.

The main question a cube designer needs to ask themselves is what doubling up on a card actually does for their cube. Why should I have multiples of this card rather than look for a suitable alternative? Does one even exist?

My personal view is that it only makes sense to double up when you can clearly fix a gameplay issue for which there is not a viable alternative. I would never double up on purely powerful cards like Lightning Bolt or Swords to Plowshares; those cards are already very sought after and punch way above their weight class. I'm not solving a problem by adding more copies of powerful cards, I'd just be homogenizing the power band. If it doesn't improve gameplay, I'm not interested. My goal isn't to inject a higher power level in my cube, but rather to fix up weak points or problem areas. I love using unique cards and prefer single copies whenever applicable, but if I'm losing out on superior gameplay experiences, I'm not going to make that sacrifice.

When used effectively, breaking singleton can heavily enrich the design experience for yourself as a cube curator and for the gameplay experience of your players. I've done a lot of experimenting over the years, so I figure I'd share my findings with you guys in case you want to give it a try sometime:

The land base is one of the most important parts of a cube, arguably the section that should be completed prior to any further customization. For myself, I wanted to simulate a Legacy-lite environment with great fixing and giving my players access to solid mana bases. I'm not a fan of ABUR duals for monetary and gameplay reasons; there's just no decision-making with these. There is no opportunity cost to playing these off a fetchland or deploying them right away. Shocklands introduce a gameplay decision point of having it enter tapped/untapped at the cost of 2 damage. This can matter when playing against an aggressive deck that can take advantage of the extra damage or make you pay for taking a turn off from on-curve development by playing it tapped. Later in a tight game, a player might also not be as willing to play it untapped for fear of falling into the danger zone. These seem like great ways to enrich the gameplay experience by offering more decision points, so I decided to double-down with shocks.

At a 360 implementation, the core of my mana suite was running double shocks and double fetches. Initially this worked how I intended by slightly helping out aggressive decks, but I soon realized that the opportunity cost for especially savvy drafters wasn't nearly as high as it should have been. With a plethora of easy fixing options, with so many cards to fetch up and not miss a beat with gameplay, there was no impetus to draft a desirable land for your deck early on if you could expect a similar option to be available later. If you're solidly in 2 colors like in a u-r shell your options for fixing are more limited and you'll snatch up that Steam Vents as soon as it comes your way, but if you're playing a 3 color Jeskai shell your options for fixing jump to every shock in your color combination and all but 1 fetchland!

Or, on the flipside, prioritizing fixing early on gave you an abundance of riches and the ability to snag any attractive options that came your way in later packs. Oh, I can play Monastery Mentor, Kolaghan's Command, and this Ral Zarek without missing a beat? Sounds good!

Well, not to me as a designer. Synergies be damned, I just want to play all the good cards! This is exactly what I did NOT want to see. In the years since, I've kept double fetches in my environment, but I've dropped to a single set of shocklands where possible and supplemented it with the cycle of lands from BFZ instead:

I wanted to push my drafters more towards 2 colors potentially splashing a 3rd rather than the 3 color defaults that they were leaning towards. This has been an excellent solution for me; I see more of the kinds of decks that I had initially envisioned, and there's some opportunity cost now with sequencing for especially greedy mana bases. No more just making up the life loss from shocks with sheer efficiency and being able to play anything and everything; now you might need to take a hit in tempo to get that sweet fixing going. I can't imagine ever taking these out of my cube, they've been an elegant solution to my goodstuff problem. Now, if only Wizards could complete a dual-land affiliated cycle in a timely manner for once.

For a long time I had issues with the aggressive suite commonly found in most cubes where aggro tended to fall into one of two archetypes: R/x Aggro with burn or white weenie "critical mass" aggro. In both strategies you need to go deep on low CMC creatures throwing in just about every Elite Vanguard variant you could get your hands on and then hope to be able to apply a ton of pressure early before closing it out with some reach. For red decks, that reach came in the form of burn spells. For white decks it came in the form of MLD like Armageddon or Ravages of War as your curve-toppers. The R/x strategy is tried and true, and burn spells are desirable across multiple archetypes, but I never felt the same about MLD. It just doesn't lead to fun or engaging gameplay from my experience as it's relatively easy to garner a massive advantage in a 1v1 format like traditional cube. I just think they were an entirely inelegant solution to building aggressive archetypes, like taking a hammer to a minor imperfection on a furniture piece.

I wanted to introduce more decision-making and sequencing into aggressive decks. I wanted to the individual card choices to actually matter. For that to happen, you need to create gameplay patterns that cannot be as thoroughly replicated in other aggressive strategies. Just having a bunch of 2/1s doesn't cut it; that homogenizes the archetype as a whole to where you're just looking to hit a threshold. The individual cards don't really end up mattering; you just care about having that 2/1 for 1. This made more sense years back when we had limited options and Elite Vanguard wasn't embarrassing to run, but we've gotten so many great options nowadays that we no longer need to rely upon that.

To that end, I found that focusing upon human synergies in w-b and recursive bodies in b made a HUGE difference in bringing a unique identity to these offerings. I've gone into this more in depth with my Archetype primer on B/W Human Aggro. Give it a read for more details!

This archetype has since become a core component for aggressive strategies in my cube and I can't imagine ever going away from it. It's just very compact, introduces new angles of attack, and keeps my players engaged and interested.

I'd say that breaking singleton is most effective when it comes to buildaround cards. Birthing Pod was one of the more interesting buildarounds at the time and I was hoping to replicate the Modern iteration (RIP) to an extent in my cube. A single Pod wasn't enough to be worth building around, but 2 in a 40 card deck sounded about right. An all-in Pod deck that absolutely needs the card to function wasn't a consistent place to be, but having it as a value piece and potential engine? Sure, let's give it a shot.

Mixed reviews since then; Pod is hit or miss sort of archetype. The sweet Pod lists are fun to play and interesting to draft around, but actual gameplay is kind of lacking without the redundancy you'd get with multiple copies of a card in a 60 card format. Sweet synergistic builds are fun when you can take advantage of individual pieces in a unique way, but generic value pod lists end up being decks where you're jumping through an extra hoop for no real reason most of the time. Still, I'm not using up very many slots for this, so it's a fine inclusion for now.

Theoretically Brainstorm should shine in a legacy-lite environment with multiple fetchlands. It has for me on occasion, pulling off the Legacy trick of drawing 3 fresh cards and fetching away two duds feels great every time, but it feels pretty bad if you get Brainstorm-locked without a shuffle effect. From gameplay experiences, I've found that in the decks where I'm most often utilizing cantrips I want to be able to dig deeper to find a card I'm looking for. Be it a wrath or a finisher, I just need to be able to get there by churning through my deck and scrying or shuffling away things that I just don't need. Where before I was scoffing at other options in comparison to the ceiling on Brainstorm, I wasn't taking into consideration that the floor of a "lesser" cantrip is sometimes exactly what you need in a given situation. I've since gone back and diversified my suite of one mana cantrips with the likes of Ponder, Preordain and even Opt. The first two are just excellent and as for Opt? I just want to live the Stormwing Entity with an active Young Pyromancer dream. Just let me have this.

Breaking singleton can be a powerful tool when utilized correctly but even I'll admit that it can have its shortcomings. Lack of competition for more niche cards in pack 3 just leads to dead slots in a draft. If you aren't already in the Birthing Pod deck, seeing both copies end up in the 3rd pack wheeling around the table is just a feels-bad and wasted space. This issue is especially evident in larger than 360 cubes where you might just not even see the 2nd copy in a draft.

I thought long and hard about this and implemented a Voucher System into my own cube in the last year and it has worked fantastically the few times I was able to organize a draft. I'll go into more detail about it in a follow-up article in the near future!

If you're having trouble filling in the holes of a given archetype, why not break singleton? You've got nothing to lose and so much to gain from a game design perspective. Thanks for reading, let me know how your experiences with breaking singleton have gone. I'd love to hear about them!

@Shamim | /u/Karametric | shamizy at Riptide Labs

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