The Mission of the Cube

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Intro

I realize that despite writing a decent amount about the cube, I've never actually set down the goal and mission of it in detail, so that's what this blog post is all about. Hopefully it will put into context the decisions I made, and help people figure out if this cube is for them!

Overall Goal

I've been involved with Magic since about 2009. My first wave of playing came after I discovered the game; a friend introduced me to drafting and we played a bunch of drafts at our local LGS, starting with Scars of Mirroden. Once I got to college, I quit playing for various reasons. I started playing again during Amonkhet, and as I learned more about Magic and its history, I heard again and again how great Innistrad draft was, and found out it had been released just after I quit.
The fact that I had just barely missed out on one of the greatest draft experiences in Magic's history kept bugging me, especially as I drafted more and got better at it.

When I finally decided to build a cube, Innistrad was the natural choice for several reasons. First, I wanted to build a set cube so that I didn't need to worry about designing a cube from scratch. Second, Innistrad is a legendary format and I wanted to experience what I had missed. And finally, with older sets slowly getting more expensive over time, especially with the recent pandemic and EDH boom, I wanted to put together Innistrad before it became prohibitively expensive even for a cube.

With this in mind, I elected to build an original Innistrad set cube that replicated the original draft experience as closely as possible.

The Details

With that decision made, I had to decide how to actually build the cube. I did some research into the various ratios, cube sizes, and their respective feels. The most widely used ratio for set cubes appears to be 3/2/1, as it's usually a good balance between size, cost, and feel. However, many players agreed that to really replicate a set so it feels like the original draft experience requires about 5 or 6 sets of commons and 3 sets of uncommons, for a 6/3/1 ratio. Another personal consideration was that I wanted to create actual boosters with my cube, and to have no leftovers after boosters were created. In the end, I ended up using the 6/3/1 ratio as a starting point and created my own ratio that's discussed in the Golden Ratio post.