A Primer for Cube Primers

A Primer for Cube PrimersBy Maramas | 3 years ago

TL;DR: Have you ever wanted to have an elegant "cube primer" for introducing people to your cube environment? This article breaks down the steps you need to take in order to make your own cube primer, and also offers some copy-and-paste-able templates to get you started (jump to the end for templates).

Cubes are intimidating.

If you're reading this article, you probably have a cube. Perhaps you've been curating one for years. Perhaps it's just a digital list right now. Maybe you don't have a cube yet, in which case: Welcome! You are not the intended audience of this article, but I hope you learn something anyways.

Regardless of your situation, I want you to cast your mind back to the first time you experienced a cube. I remember my first time drafting one, because it went something like: "Pack one looks sick... Wait isn't that card worth $100 oh damn these are all insane... Oh, oh wait, oh no, everyone's already picked a card and I'm the only one left... so I guess I just take the card I know is banned in Commander?" I was entirely unfamiliar with the draft environment. Many cubes run at such a high power level or bear such a complex soup of abilities and keywords that new drafters might have no idea what types of decks they are "supposed" to be drafting. Conversely, some other cubes cultivate a specific Pauper Kamigawa Tiny Leaders environment where literally no-one knows what is going on ~~because even the cube designer doesn't know~~. All of this points to the necessity of resources that can help your new drafters get familiar with your cube—familiar enough that they can comfortably sit down and draft it without being so overwhelmed that it detracts from their experience. A Cube Primer, if you will.

Regular Magic sets are easier to "learn," and therefore don't require as much introduction. They have limited card pools (usually sub-250, not 360+), their archetypes are usually defined by easy-to-understand commons and uncommons, and these archetypes are usually somewhat intuitive. Take these four cards from Avacyn Restored, for example:

Now, Avacyn Restored was a bit of an odd draft environment. Due in part to the prevalence of high-risk abilities like Soulbond and Auras, there was a shocking lack of removal in the set. But its archetypes were basic enough and visible enough that it wasn't that hard to quickly describe to someone what types of decks they might be able to draft. Blue and green worked well together by combining abilities like Druid's Familiar and Elgaud Shieldmate, while red and white worked well together through the synergies of go-wide cards like Goldnight Commander and Thatcher Revolt. Black had a fun sub-theme of cards that rewarded you for only having one creature, such as Homicidal Seclusion and Demonic Taskmaster, etc. etc. These are easy archetypes to explain. Nowadays, anyone can look up an old draft primer for Avacyn Restored, and the same can be done for any new set that hits the market, since MTG content creators, well, create so much content. It only takes a few minutes of reading/listening to give someone a working understanding of these draft environments. Not an "I'm going to crush a PT draft of this set"-level of understanding, but enough of a grasp to feel OK drafting the set. Enough of a grasp to have fun while drafting, since that is the point, after all. So why not make a primer like this for Cube? It makes sense that, just like with every other draft environment, one could make a primer for drafting cubes.

There's one problem, though: Every cube is different.

And that brings us to the meat of this article: how to make a Cube Primer for your own cube.

Author's Note: Feel free to reference my own cube primer for The Tabletop Cube as you go along. It is extremely long, and by no means a universally helpful cube primer, but it can give you an example of how one might implement the advice in this article. If you do like the format of my primer, I have links to plaintext versions of it at the end of this article for you to ~~steal~~ use with my wholehearted support.

Step One: Identify your Audience

Audience is to "primers" what location is to real estate. If you don't have an audience in mind, you are merely shouting into the void. For instance, this article is aimed at an audience composed of fellow cube-creators. Probably +95% of you who are still reading this article have a cube listed on this site. Because of that knowledge, I use words like "draft archetype" without blinking, and don't bother giving you the definition of an "environment."

My personal cube's primer has an audience that:

Knows how to play Magic: the Gathering,
Knows how to literally draft, i.e. the rules of passing packs and so forth,
Has most likely never drafted a cube before, or if they have, it has been one like the Arena Cube on MTG: Arena, and
Does not intuitively know why Llanowar Elves and Opposition are such fast friends.

This means that, in writing my primer, I should:

Assume a general knowledge of MTG game rules and draft etiquette,
Assume a lack of familiarity with most of the specific cards in the cube, and
Assume an ignorance of many of the "classic draft archetypes" in the cube.

But that's not all. There are a few more questions to ask yourself about your audience:

Are they comfortable with reading a long primer? i.e. Do I sacrifice thoroughness in favor of brevity?
Are they able to read this primer on a desktop computer? Hover-over Text is crucial to many primers, but flounders on mobile devices and is impossible for print-outs.
Do they appreciate witticism and/or memes? i.e. Do I want a no-nonsense primer or one that uses the occasional spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down?

Think for a minute and come to an answer on each of these questions. Once you have a general idea of who, generally, your Cube Primer's audience will be, you can progress to the next step.

Step Two: Set your Goals

What should someone get out of reading your primer?

My cube's primer has two goals:

Familiarize the reader with the classic, achievable draft archetypes in the cube, and
Familiarize the reader with the most iconic cards in the cube.

Some other goals that you may wish to fulfill include (but are not limited to):

Explaining what a "cube" is, or even what a "draft" is. This would be a great idea for people who want to introduce a friend group to Cube who might only ever play Standard or Commander or kitchen table magic (cough - identify your audience - cough).
Pointing out the hidden, spicy options in your cube: sneaky combos, unintuitive interactions, etc. This is a great idea if your audience is composed of experienced drafters (cough - audience - cough).
Laying out the groundwork of your design philosophy and giving a breakdown of why you decided to break or maintain symmetry across certain themes. This is probably only a good idea if your audience is composed of enfranchised cube designers (audience... you know the drill).

Consider the following two primers, which are MUCH shorter than my main cube's primer:

My Battlebox's primer is just the rules of how to play Battlebox. That's all it has to be. The rest is intentionally left to the discovery of the drafter.

My Old-Border Cube's primer is only half-finished at the time of this article's writing, but what I want to point out is its structure. In that primer, I briefly describe my cube's Major Archetypes, Supported Tribes (think Elves/Goblins/etc.), Card-Specific Archetypes, and Minor Archetypes/Supported Keywords. These categories are relatively short and to the point, because that cube's audience is composed of experienced Magic players who only want a taste of the Cube's general structure before they dive into an explorative, nostalgia-laden draft.

Neither cube's primer will ever be longer than a page or two. They don't need to be. A "Primer" is just a concise compilation of all the information that you want drafters to know before they draft. If that compiled information is fairly short and simple (think "This cube is based on the MTGO Vintage Cube but has like 7 Conspiracies in it and I couldn't afford X cards"), then your primer may only need a paragraph or two. Again, it all boils down to your audience and your goals.

If you're having trouble deciding what to actually say in your primer, try asking someone else what they would find helpful for your cube. For example, when working on the primer for my cube, I had my good friend Sam (who has drafted the cube before) take a look at the archetypes I had chosen to present and we discussed some that I might want to include/remove. Also, remember that like cubes themselves your primer will doubtlessly change over time. After you have someone read the "finished" version, ask for their thoughts! What was helpful, and what was not? Was it too long, too short, too dry, too all over the place? You'll be able to polish it over time.

Step Three: Start Writing

This is where the fun begins (obligatory).

You have a goal in mind by this point, and now you can start vomiting it onto the page. Don't worry about it looking pretty at first: just focus on getting down the information you want to pass on.

Generally, you will want to structure your primer something like:

Introduction. Say hello to your target audience, whether that be the friends to whom you will be giving this primer or just strangers on the internet.
Short explanation. "This primer is intended to familiarize you with..."
The actual primer. Don't worry—we're getting there.
Closing thoughts. (Leave this for last)

Unlike what some of your English teachers may have taught you way back when, I strongly recommend that you start by writing your introduction instead of diving right into the meat of the primer. This helps you to crystalize the questions you answered in steps 1 and 2 about audience and goals. I'm not going to tell you how to write, because this is a Cube-Primer-primer, not a Fundamentals-of-Style-primer, but I will give you some advice.

You'll want to find an easy and intuitive way to break down your primer into manageable chunks. Is your primer focused on the archetypes of your cube? Great! Decide on the handful of archetypes you wish to introduce (RDW, Cheaty, Reanimator, etc.) and BOOM: you have a basic outline for your primer. Is your primer focused on the spicy flavor of your cube? Maybe you'll want to break it down into discussions on Sub-Themes, Secret Combos, and Pet Cards. Is your primer intended to be a high-level analysis of your draft environment? Consider having sections on Design Philosophy, Power Delta, As-Fan Decisions, and Win Rates. Again, all of this should flow directly from your decisions in steps 1 and 2: the questions of "What am I writing about" and "Who am I writing for."

Step Four: Making it Pretty, which is often kind of crucial for Making it Work

Note: If you're already a patented Markdown Wizard (TM), you can skip this section.

Few people want to read a primer about Magic cards without actually seeing any Magic cards. We like pictures, and it's hard to learn about cards without being able to look at them. As you keep writing your primer, you'll probably start hitting design walls, e.g. "How in the blazes do I do that fancy pop-up mouseover card image thingy?" If you're writing via a platform like CubeCobra that uses Markdown, then I'm here to help you out.

CubeCobra already gives you two helpful links for formatting card images (etc.) and for basic text formatting. Reference these pages whenever you're looking for a specific thing, but I'll give you some generic starter tips here.

The two most important things for you to link are card images and hover-over images. This is what you type for a hover-over image to appear:
[[TEXT|CARD]]
Replace TEXT with the words you want to give a hover-over image, and replace CARD with the Scryfall ID of the card image. To find that Scryfall ID, just search on CubeCobra for the card you want and the Scryfall ID will be the string of letters and numbers at the end of that webpage's URL.

So if I want to hover-over an image of Careful Study, I go to its CubeCobra webpage and find that it's Scryfall ID is "dea15b53-2940-40e7-8d48-8ec11341da83."

Therefore, typing [[Careful Study|dea15b53-2940-40e7-8d48-8ec11341da83]] gives me: Careful Study

Incorporating an in-text picture of a card is even easier: Just take that same Scryfall ID and put it into one of these: [[!/CARD]]

So to use Careful Study again, typing [[!/dea15b53-2940-40e7-8d48-8ec11341da83]] gives you:

Feel free to poke around with how to do other fancy things. Put things in *asterisks* to make them italic, and in **double asterisks** to make them bold.

I'll leave you with two templates to help get you started.

Here's a template that I made for headers:

<<[[!/CARD]] [[!/CARD]] [[!/CARD]] [[!/CARD]]>>
---
>>>
## TITLE
<<<
---
<<[[!/CARD]] [[!/CARD]] [[!/CARD]] [[!/CARD]]>>

That will give you something like this:

Welcome to the Tabletop cube!

To make the TITLE larger, go down to one #. To make the TITLE smaller, go up to three or four #.

Furthermore, you'll probably find it helpful to make a Table of Contents. To make one of those, try this template:

---
#### Table of Contents: 
1. [TEXT](LINK)
2. [TEXT](LINK)
3. [TEXT](LINK)
4. [TEXT](LINK)
---

which gives you:

Table of Contents:

The "TEXT" part is obvious, but what about the "LINK"? Go ahead and click on one of the above links. Move your mouse to just to the left of the Header that it redirected you to, and you'll see a chain-link little icon appear (🔗). That's the link to that Header. You can right-click the little 🔗 icon and select "Copy Link", then paste that URL in place of the LINKs in the template.

Now for a divisive one: Emoji 😵. I like to sprinkle a few tasteful emoji over my primer. They're very easy to use: just copy and paste the actual emoji symbol into Markdown. I use this Github page to quickly reference and copy-paste the Markdown-supported Emoji.

One last tip: Example Decks. They can be helpful for a wide range of different "cube primers." To make mine, I went to the "Playtest" tab of my cube and used "Upload Decklist," then uploaded an example deck and saved it (don't forget to name it at the bottom). Once it's saved, you can copy-paste its URL into the text of your primer.

Step Five: Wrapping Things Up.

I love primers. I love reading someone's analysis of an environment that they're passionate about. I've read countless "Introduction to My Cube" bits on people's cube landing pages, even when I had no intention of drafting their cubes. I do not expect everyone to share my love for niche explanations of an already niche corner of the Magic community, but that's the beauty of Magic, and Cube specifically: to each their own.

To stay on topic, the end of your primer is the perfect place to link any further resources or social media accounts that might be related to your cube ~~you can also just brag about any Magic-related accomplishments under your belt~~. I personally hang around the Reddit Cube community, where a lot of constructive conversation goes down about cubes, generally.

As an example, here's a link for you: the template for my cube's primer: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1etmRNfzKd41PBcZg0w38HQBgRtFMm-QPiotecdP96JA/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to use this in any capacity that you find helpful. If you want to take whole chunks of it and use them as I've written them, all I ask is that you include a link to my personal cube so that folks can see where it came from.

If you've read this far, thank you, and I hope you got something out of it. Feel free to send me a message below with your thoughts on any of this, or anything even tangentially related to cubes.

"Gold-Bordered cards are wonderful things,"
—Maramas