If you’ve ever read a limited draft primer before, you’ve probably heard of the acronym BREAD:

Bombs
Removal
Evasion
Aggro
Dregs

When drafting in a retail limited environment, this heuristic for determining card pick priority makes a lot of sense - the power delta of cards is large, and once you see a prime pick, it's unlikely to make it all the way around the table. This isn’t the case in most cube environments where most cards are already optimized for power.

The need to draft bombs early also gets diminished in cube because in most cases every card is already a bomb. There are exceptions of course - some cards are so powerful that they won’t make it around the table, but for the most part your draft deck will still be powerful enough to close out games even if you only grab the bottom 5 cards in every pack.

Knowing that, we have to reframe how we think about card priority in cube drafting. May I introduce SLAGBRASH (catchy, I know):

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This list consists of all the broken cards that everyone has heard of: the Power 9, Jace, the Mind Sculptor and more. I would also put Fractured Identity in this category. If you aren't drafting a powered list, continue to the next category below.

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These cards are core to "staying open" (discussed further below). Because cubes often run lands that are stronger than any retail limited set, it's rarely a bad idea to grab them early and see how they'll fit into your future deck.

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These are the cards that strongly draw you into an archetype. Discussed further below, it's easy to accidentally get into the same archetype as someone else at the table, so while you want to draft these highly, you should try to ensure that the archetype is open first. Archetype Enablers and Generically Powerful cards (below) are almost neck-and-neck for priority, and are context-dependent.

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In the absence of cards that draw you into an archetype, cards that slot well into multiple archetypes and are strong on their own are the next best thing.

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Build-Arounds are different than Archetype Enablers in that if you draft a Build-Around but fail to have the deck come together, you are left without a viable deck. If you pick up an Archetype Enabler and are unable to find the full synergy of the intended deck, the card is likely good enough to stand on its own.

Build-Arounds are a little difficult to place in the priority because you rarely want to first pick them due to their relatively lower power level, but you also don’t want to pick them up or see them too late in a draft because they often require a high density of support cards to make work. Within the first pack or so it’s best to determine if there are any Build-Arounds you want to go for and start shaping your draft around that. If you don’t see any you like, you can just ignore its place on this listing.

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Removal is almost a requirement for any good cube deck, but usually there's an abundance of it in a draft pool. These cards go above "deck filler" status, but are often not game-winning on their own. In the absence of the card categories listed above, it's never a bad idea to snap up some answers. Removal is also generically powerful in many archetypes, so at some point you will be competing with other drafters for it.

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So you've gotten your Archetype Enablers and/or Build-Arounds, now it's time to support them with their lesser counterparts. If you've navigated the draft well in the early stages, you should be able to grab these cards with little competition.

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We are just about at the bottom of the barrel here folks. You get passed 5 cards, none of them are exciting or in your color, so you have to grab that fringe card or the slightly off-color gold removal spell. Many cubes try to not include cards that are strictly "sideboard cards", but inevitably in each draft, they will exist.

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You get passed a pack with no good options for your deck - not even fringe sideboard cards. The only thing left to do is take a card out of the card pool that you don't want to play against. This is also section where paying attention to cards in the pool and signaling is crucial - if you start to see a bunch of reanimator cards get snatched up for example, it would help you decide to hate draft an Ashen Rider over a Wildfire. It's almost never a good idea to hate draft before reaching this point, but once you're here, have a blast.

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Aside from build-around cards, prioritizing this list from the top-down for most of your picks should yield a very solid draft pool. Of course, there are many exceptions to this, and with increased drafting experience you will begin to naturally get a feel for what pick orders will yield the best results.

On the Importance of Staying Open

Because each card is so strong and many cubes are broken up into archetypes, it’s best to see which archetypes are open before committing to one. General advice is to take power/lands/signets for your first few picks while noting which archetype-defining cards come around the table. For example, if you open a Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary and a Misty Rainforest in your first pack, someone to your right could have opened a Natural Order or Joraga Treespeaker and decide to go hard into mono-green, which leaves you both competing for the same resources, but you get cut off for that entire pack. If you take the Misty Rainforest and then note that the Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary came around for your second pick, there’s a very good chance that the green deck is open and you can adjust your draft style to start prioritizing those cards.

And Finally

The advice and card examples used in this article are focused at Legacy/Vintage cubes, but can be applied to other types of cubes as well. These are all just general guidelines for how to optimize your draft experience going into a cube format relatively blind. Of course you can choose to force an archetype no matter what comes your way (I’m guilty of this, frequently), and in cube that can be a perfectly viable strategy.