Pai Gow
Cube ID
Art by Viko Menezes
Self-Contained Pai Gow Cube.
The idea:
Self-contained
: only thing needed is dice. Life can easily be tracked mentally.- Some cards are busted, while others need to be built around. The fun is building and balancing (or not balancing) your piles so that you can win the majority of your matches.
The set-up:
- Deal 9 cards to each player face-down.
- Players look at their cards at the same time and make face-down piles of 3 card decks.
- Each player should have 3 decks of 3 cards each.
- The decks should be ordered before they are locked in.
- First player to lock in their piles gets to select P/D in game 1.
How to play: Regular rules of 2-player magic but...
- 5 starting life total instead of 20.
- Start with all 3 cards in hand.
- Drawing from an empty library does not lead to a loss.
- You have infinite mana of each color.
- If both players pass twice without taking any game actions, game results in a draw, regardless of life totals.
- If tie, P/D choice of next game stays with whoever had choice of the tied game.
- Else, loser choses P/D for next game.
- Match win goes to majority games won.
Alternatives:
- Make 3 piles, determine who goes first.
- Each player picks which deck their opp will use before every game.
Cube Targets:
- Expand cube to 200-250 [Currently 174].
- Set presence max 15% [Currently 16%].
- Self-contained, only exception is energy but it isn't a big player.
In a 9 card hand, I would prefer that there are less than 3 cards in that hand to be from the same set. That way there aren't synergies caused by being in the same set. The goal is to discover new and unintuitive ways that cards can interact. Since 1/9 = 11% and 2/9 = 22%, then 15% set presence is a good target.
Current size 122
Sets of largest presence:
WOE | MH3 | MOM | BLB | MKM |
---|---|---|---|---|
16.39% | 16.39% | 9.84% | 7.38% | 4.10% |
20 | 20 | 12 | 9 | 4 |