TL;DR: What if Wizards' design philosophy of F.I.R.E were actually a good heuristic for building Cubes? This article explores the merits of of Fun, Inviting, Replayable, and Exciting cubes, and uses the catchy mnemonic of SHIVaN FIRE to breathe new, firey life into the now-(in)famous acronym.
By now, you've probably heard of F.I.R.E.
In case you haven't, F.I.R.E. is the design philosophy espoused by Wizard's R&D since 2019. It expresses the four "core goals" of the design process for new Magic cards (Fun, Inviting, Replayable, and Exciting), and it drives how cards are crafted for all new sets. It is perhaps most famous (or infamous) for leading to cards such as the following, all of which have seen bans in Standard or even Legacy:
Those are some powerful cards.
In the past few years, cardboard rectangles like these ones have helped me come to a much better understanding of what kinds of cards I do and do not want to have in my cubes. "What makes a card powerful?" is a central question in Magic, and Cube is no exception. "What makes a card fun?" is perhaps less frequently asked, though it is arguably an even more important question for the philosophy of Cube. I spent a lot of 2020 thinking about F.I.R.E. and how it compared to my own design philosophies, and in early 2021 I'm ready to share some of the conclusions I've come to. Don't worry—this article isn't going to be yet another take on how F.I.R.E. is destroying Magic. You can find enough of those already. Instead, this is going to be a discussion about three things:
My hope in writing this article is to lay out some of my personal Cube design philosophy, which can help you do anything from building your first Cube to tweaking your fifth one. These are by no means hard-and-fast rules; I encourage you to adopt any aspects of this philosophy that will improve your own Cube experience, and throw out any that will not.
I know that I just said that this article isn't meant to bash on F.I.R.E., but I will get a few things out of the way now because they are relevant to these discussions. I think that Oko, Uro, Lurrus, Fires, and others like them were/are problematic cards not because of F.I.R.E. itself, but because of how it was implemented. I doubt that many readers and cube designers would say "You know what? I don't like Magic cards that are Fun. I don't like Magic cards that are Inviting. And I could care less about Replayability and Excitement." Instead, most people look at the stagnant formats that these cards haunted and say "Wait a minute. Playing with these cards, and playing against these cards, simply isn't fun, or inviting, or replayable, or exciting. It's just boring and repetitive."
Which brings us to our first point:
Card design and Cube/Set design are two very different things.
One of the basic tenets of Cube design is that your cube should be... well, designed. Cards are put in it for a purpose, even if that purpose is just that you like the cards. Do you want Ewww! to be in your cube? Great! Slap that bad boy in. Do you not want Ewww! in your cube? Fine! Slap that bad boy out. If your cube is designed with the purpose of playing with pauper cards, it will probably have a lot of commons in it. If your cube is designed with the purpose of playing with power, it will probably have a few moxen in it. You get to decide if cards are "too good" or "not good enough" for your cube—to decide whether they are a good fit for your environment or not. Are F.I.R.E. cards broken in your format? Throw them out! Are they fun and exciting? Slot them in!
You see, every single Magic card was designed for an environment other than your cube, by someone other than you (unless you're a member of R&D or have a Custom Card Cube, in which case: I'm still waiting for Fateseal to make its return in White). How and why a Magic card is designed is not particularly relevant to most cubes because the whole point of a cube is to be the environment that you want it to be. You're not going to put Ancestral Recall into your pauper cube or Pitiless Vizier into your powered cube (probably). Because of this, from a Cube Design perspective, it doesn't really matter why or how a specific card was made—just that the card exists, and that you can put it into your cube if your cube would be better off with its inclusion. Yes, if you are someone who wants new cards for your cube and Wizards only prints new cards that you don't like, you're going to be in an annoying place. But that's a different topic—the long-term health of Magic as a game may affect the resources you have available to build your cube from, but it does not affect the philosophy with which you design your cube itself.
Cube Design is all about taking the cards that have already been designed, and using them to come up with the environment that best suits your goals.
Uro is a great talking-point in this regard. Uro was Standard-warping before it ate a ban, and I think most would be comfortable in saying that it was unhealthy for the format. In Cube, on the other hand, I have talked to many people who run powerful or fast enough of cubes that Uro isn't nearly the warping end-all-be-all of their formats that he was in Standard. Again, just because a card was designed to be F.I.R.E. does not mean that the card was actually Fun, Inviting, Replayable, or Exciting in its intended environment, nor that it would necessarily be good or bad in your environment. Perhaps you have beef with stupid, sexy Flanders. That's fine. He did standard a dirty. But he doesn't have to do your cube a dirty, because if he doesn't jive with your cube then you can just boot him from your list. In other words, whether or not a card was designed to be F.I.R.E. or not really doesn't matter for a cube designer. What matters is whether those cards are fun, inviting, replayable, and exciting in their own cube
Which brings me to my second point: F.I.R.E. philosophy, when taken at face value, is actually a pretty good heuristic when it comes to designing your cube.
Snapcaster Mage is a F.I.R.E. card.
Change my mind.
No, but seriously, Snapcaster Mage is an actually F.I.R.E. card. Is it Fun? Hell yeah; everyone loves playing Snapcaster Mage. It can even be fun to play against, since you have to think through all of the ways that it could be used against you. Is it Inviting? Definitely. Who doesn't read that textbox and think "Hmmm, how can I break this little fellow?" Is it Replayable? Given that it has been flashing back spells for ages (a decade this year!), and its ability can hit 25% of the cards in most cubes, I'd say yeah, it's replayable as hell. And finally, is it Exciting? I can't speak for anyone else, but I get excited every time I put Snappy into a deck. You just know that there are going to be fun moments as a result of his inclusion.
Snapcaster Mage is, to me, the perfect example of F.I.R.E. philosophy as it could be—as an initial heuristic for evaluating whether or not a card might be a good fit for your cube. Again, I would bet that 99% of cube designers out there want their cube to be Fun, Inviting, Replayable, and Exciting. What they don't want is for their environment to devolve into the repetitive, deterministic messes that a lot of actual F.I.R.E.-designed cards brought upon their debut environments.
Let's take a look at a few more cards that I run in the Tabletop Cube:
All of these cards are straight F.I.R.E. They get your brain turning, they make your opponent think about their own actions, they cause a lot of "Oh sh-" moments, and they play out differently almost every game (well, Settle the Wreckage is more one-dimensional, but it makes each game in a match play differently after the first time it resolves). These are the sorts of cards that I like to build the core of my cube around—cards that define the power level of the environment, and the ways that tempo and other advantages are accrued. Undeniably, these are three powerful cards: a bomb, a buildaround, and an extremely effective one-sided sweeper. They are Fun, Inviting, Replayable, and Exciting.
But these cards are far more than just four adjectives, because they are also good and healthy parts of the ecosystem that is my cube. They are not format-warping. You do not HAVE to draft any of these three cards if they pass to you in order to feel like you are drafting well. When you see one of these cards hit the table/stack across from you, you do not pull an Oko-groan of "Ohhh, I know exactly how this game is going to play out, and it's not the type of game I enjoy playing." This is due to the fact that, beyond the Card Design of these cards, they are in a cube that has a design philosophy that accommodates them. And what design philosophy is that, you may ask?
I present to you: SHIVaN FIRE.
The SHIVaN FIRE philosophy takes the card-design elements of F.I.R.E. and places them in a set-design framework that I am dubbing S.H.I.Va.N.
S. elf-contained,
H. ealthy,
I. nteractive,
Va. riable, and
N. ostalgic
These are the basic metrics by which I evaluate cards that I am considering adding to (or removing from) my cube. As we all know, even if a card is Fun it may not be a good fit for your format, and just because it is Exciting does not mean that it will be well-supported.
Self-contained:This one is more a reminder than anything else. Your cube is your cube. Never forget that, as it is a freeing notion. Amazing new Standard card comes out? You only need it if you want it, since your cube is self-contained. Card gets banned in Legacy? You didn't even notice, actually, becuase it literally doesn't effect you, since your cube is self-contained. Wizards of the Coast starts printing cards that you don't like? You don't need to run them. Once you have designed a cube, it is its own environment. If you want to change that environment over time, you can certainly do so, but you don't have to. Do I change the rules of Settlers of Catan(TM) every year to spice things up? No, because I like the game the way it is. Could I add in Catan expansions if I wanted to? Of course! Your cube doesn't have to be anything other than what you want it to be. Technically, if you want to play with your cube, it kind of has to be interesting enough to the people you want to play with that they will actually play with it. But trust me: as someone who has played with a lot of different cubes and a lot of different folks, I can confidently say that very few of the people with whom you actually will want to play repeatedly are the sort of people to trash talk your cube.
Healthy:This one's tricky, as evidenced by how often the Magic community has called various play environments "unhealthy" over the past... well, entire history of Magic. The funny thing about the health of a format is that, unlike medical health, it lives entirely in the minds of the people involved. If everyone thinks that a format is fun and healthy, then it is. The hard part is figuring out what things people do and do not like about a format, and trying to fix them. For formats like Standard, this is nigh impossible to ascertain before a set's release because what a "healthy" format looks like varies depending on whom you ask, and the audience for new sets is huge.
"But wait!" you might be thinking. "I don't need to get it right the first time." You would be correct, since you can make changes to your cube over time, nurturing it toward a more healthy state. "Also," you muse, "Only like 15 people have ever even played with my Cube and by 15 I mean 0 because I've been working on the list really hard, OK?" You would be correct once again. Your format is NOT Standard. It doesn't need to please a hundred thousand people on the first try.
Ask yourself, after you've played a few drafts: "Does my format feel healthy? Why or why not?" Then ask the same question to the core of people with whom you Cube and you will have essentially a 100% accurate idea of how everyone who plays your format feels about the health of the format. Wizards R&D would kill for that high of a sample rate. If everyone thinks that the format is fun and healthy, then it is, though of course that may change over time as the players change, the cards change, and people get to know the intricacies and "best practices" of the format. But again, as your playgroup changes, so too can your list.
This is the facet of my design philosophy wherein I fill many of the "non-F.I.R.E." slots of my own cube. Take the following four cards:
These cards on not particularly high in my personal F.I.R.E. hierarchy. They're certainly not particularly Exciting, at least. But they are extremely Healthy cards in my format. I need low-to-the-ground threats to keep my playgroup from devolving into one big durdle-fest (because I know that the people who draft my cube do not think durdling is very healthy). I need Blue cards that stay on the board and make combat more thought-provoking. I need instant-speed removal that hits a wide range of targets for reasons that will be clear in the next section. I need resilient mana dorks because "Bolt the Bird" is a real thing.
Time for a confession: None of these cards were in the first iteration of my cube (and not just because most of them hadn't been printed yet). These cards were added in over time to make the format healthier. Taking your medicine is not always sexy, but I promise you that it will make your cube more fun in the long run.
Interactive:Ah, interaction—you white whale, you. When someone doesn't like that their opponents keep doing things they can't stop, they say "this format needs more interaction!" Conversely, when someone doesn't like how reliably their opponent can shut down everything they try to do, they say "I still can't make any meaningful decisions! Where's the interaction?"
I have found that at least 75% of the time I hear someone bemoaning a lack of interaction, what they have really been craving is agency. (I almost made Agency the "A" in SHIVaN, but decided to stick with the more commonly-used buzzword that is Interaction.) Like with Health, this is not a thing that you get right the first time, but something that you work towards. How often do your players end a game and say "I couldn't deal with X, and I don't think I could have dealt with it?" Too much or too little interaction and most people start to get salty.
My cube is no exception, and for as long as I own it I will be making tweaks to increase agency. Take "answers," for example. Do your players like the option of playing degenerate nonsense but don't enjoy dying to it every time? Put in some answers that can stop the madness. Are your blue slots full of cards that like to flip people off? Sometimes, a decidedly NON-interactive card is actually the solution, as it can make a format feel MORE interactive by giving deck-builders agency. Oh, and you can also run answers to Thrun. You probably already do, if you run him. You can have answers to your answers, people. It's answers all the way down.
"But interaction means more than just having a response held up!" you say, and you are, as always, correct in calling me out. "I want cards that do stuff with other stuff. I want choices, and I want those choices to target things!"
Sounds good. How about this guy?
All joking aside, I am not going to tell you which cards you need to add or remove from your cube for the sake of interaction. Maybe Oko is the kind of interaction that works well in your cube. Maybe he isn't. I would hazard a guess that whether you run him or not boils down to if his abilities add agency to the format, or remove it.
The takeaway for Interaction is to watch how people play with your cube, and try note how much agency they have. I have an entirely loosy-goosy extremely scientific metric for gauging how interactive my format is, which is to:
- Watch how often players point to cards on the table, and
- Watch how often players sound irritated when cards are pointed to.
To bring back Hero's Downfall, I have noticed in watching people play with this card that it causes a lot of folks to yell "Noooo!" but in a good way. It causes heightened moments of play, not "whoopee, another elk" moments of play, even though it is just a run-of-the-mill removal spell.
As a side note, I want to make a Hot Take right here about "synergy," that hallmark of cube designers everywhere: I think that Synergy is a subset of Interaction, and should be treated as such. I won't dive too deep into the topic here, as it could be its own article (and many well-known Cubers have already talked about synergy), but I will plant a seed in your mind that you should consider approaching synergy from the same standpoint as interaction. Synergy essentially boils down to the interaction between the cards in your own deck, as opposed to the interaction between your deck's cards and your opponents'. Do players feel a lack of agency because their decks are all standalone cards? Synergy lets players feel like they are making meaningful draft and play decisions because they can manipulate how their cards interact with one another. "Positive self-interaction" via synergy can be just as important as "negative opponent-interaction" via removal and answers.
Variable:"But wait," you ask. "F.I.R.E. already has Replayable in it." Yes it does! But replayability is not necessarily tied to variability. Take breakfast cereal, for example. I love me some breakfast cereal. I "replay" it almost every morning. But is it variable? Not to me—it's usually the same ol', same ol', and I simply like it enough to eat it most days of my life.
In Magic, there are cards that are Replayable but not Variable, and the other way around. Take Rofellos, for instance. He makes you mana. That's... mostly it. And I will always love playing with this guy. Is he highly variable? Not really, but he is highly replayable. Now compare him to Awakening Zone. 95% of the time, Rofellos is a "much better magic card." But I love the spot that Awakening Zone plays in my cube. Why? Because it is variable. Sometimes, you just need the incremental colorless mana. Sometimes, you need free blockers. Sometimes, you need anthem targets for a go-wide push. Once in a blue moon, you pull off some funky token-doubling shenanigans. If I had to choose only one of these two cards to play, I would probably sigh and pick Rofellos. But I have designed my cube to have both of these cards be playable because I like the specific spice that variability brings to the table.
Moreover, there are a huge number of cards that are both powerful and variable. Look at Ponder and good old Bolt. These two cards are very simple and very powerful, but they are also high in variance. Even if you play them at similar points each in the game (often just when you draw them), their variability comes from the choices you make. What do you target with Bolt in your aggro deck? Your opponent? Their Bird? Their blocker? Variability is, in many ways, another form of Interaction, because it gives players a sense of agency. It allows for a sense of interaction with the current state of the game—interaction with the decision-making part of your own brain—interaction with "luck" and with probability.
I am a sucker for variable cards. Stonecoil SNAKE, besides not being a Serpent, fills all sorts of roles from aggro beater to midrange monster, making it more fun to play than a lot of other "generically good cards." Phyrexian Metamorph can go into a mono-green deck if you're not a coward, and there is a TON of hidden agency in its ability to "break singleton" in a singleton format. Ephemerate can be removal-protection for your combo piece, on top of already having a different effect each game because of the ETB effects of your creatures. Booster Tutor needs no introduction. It's fun as hell.
Lastly, variable cards make for interesting decisions while drafting, not just while playing. I am a huge proponent for designing cubes with the draft in mind, not just with the resulting decks in mind, and I have found that variable cards make drafting a more engaging process. Not only do they slightly reduce the number of feels-bad drafts where you feel like you are struggling to fill the holes in your deck, but they also increase the number of times you think "how can I make this card better than it reads at face value?" If those are things you also desire, then I recommend looking for variability (and identifying any lack thereof) in your own list.
And finally, Nostalgic:This is the most personal of my design elements, and the one that I fully expect many of you to largely toss out.
I am a nostalgic Magic player. I have an Old-Bordered cube, even if it's 100% digital (curse you, old-border foil prices). I am a Vorthos in many ways, and have a terrible Slobad EDH deck. My main cube's list has cut most of its chaff at this point, but still carries 3-4% nostalgic relics like Baneslayer and Elvish Piper.
I'm not telling you to keep all of your pet cards in your cube. Far from it; I have cut many of mine over the years, and enjoyed the cube more as a result (Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest). Baneslayer and Piper may not be long for this world, either. Rather, and this goes back to point #1 of Self-contained, I want to underline that your cube should feel the way you want it to feel.
I do not run any Companions in my cube. Some of them are fun, most of them are powerful, and all of them are mechanically extremely different from preexisting magic cards. I respect their interesting take on the design space of Magic, but they do not fit the feel of my cube. Playing with Companions feels like playing a different sort of Magic than I want my cube to be, so I don't include them. That is what I mean by Nostalgia: wanting to maintain a certain foundation of play across your cube.
Whenever new cards come out, there are bound to be a few that you just don't like. Cards that make you think "Mmm, I'm not sure I like where this is going," or maybe even "Back in my day..." Don't worry; you don't need to run them. Conversely, be on the lookout for new cards that, despite their novelty, build upon the foundation of play that you do want to cultivate in your cube. Once Upon a Time is a powerful, new card that I do run. If anything, it makes decks feel more nostalgic to me, because it increases the likelihood that I'll be able to actually play with the cards that I like playing with.
As another example, Modern Horizons gave me many new toys that still fit the style of playing Magic that I am nostalgic for:
These cards build upon the foundations of play that I want to cultivate in my cube, and as such I welcome them with open arms.
Nostalgia is a very personal thing, and it means different things to different people, so I suggest that you talk to your playgroup about it. What do they like about Magic? What do they like about past environments that don't really see play any more? What new developments have they been happy to see in recent years? Conversely, what did they used to like that they don't any more, and what do they dislike about new directions in Magic? These are all considerations to take into account, and to repeat myself ad nauseam, you don't need to get it right the first time. It takes tweaking. It's a steady process. Make changes as you stumble upon their necessity.
Self-contained, Healthy, Interactive, Variable, and Nostalgic.And that brings us to a close. Remember this guy?
I don't have a cube that runs Shivan Fire, but I chose it for the title of my design philosophy because it is a good mnemonic.
S.elf-contained: It's a card. It is its own thing.
H.ealthy: Shivan Fire was one of my favorite cards to play with and against in Dominaria limited.
I.nteractive: "I kill your dude."
Va.riable: "No, wait, I actually kill your bigger dude."
N.ostalgic: God, I love Dominaria. And I love Bolt-variants. And I love the dragon BBQ going down in the art.
Shivan Fire is a F.I.R.E. card. Change my mind. And the next time you're changing your own cube, maybe give SHIVaN FIRE a go, and see if it helps you narrow down your own design philosophy.
Thank you for giving this a read, and I hope you got something out of it.
"Gold-Bordered cards are wonderful things,"
Maramas (on Reddit as u/JuliusVinaigrette)