Cloned from Twoberts

Drafting the Cube

Something that I realized pretty early on in drafting this Cube is that you can’t approach the two-player draft the same way you would with two players drafting a Cube designed for eight players. Seeing as all the cards are designed to be live in all of the games, you really need to draft fewer total cards to avoid the five-color soup problem.

A Grid Draft with fewer packs or a Winston Draft with fewer total cards does the trick, though I came up with a new two-player draft format that I’ve been enjoying that tries to more closely capture the feel of drafting a pack with more players. I’m not big on naming things, so for simplicity’s sake let’s call it Minneapolis Draft.

Minneapolis Draft is a two-player draft format where both players make eight packs of seven cards. Each player starts by simultaneously opening their first pack without showing the contents to the other player, drafting one card face down, and then trading their first pack with the other player. Then each player takes two cards from the other player’s pack and trades back. Finally, players take an additional two cards from the pack they had opened and the last two cards in each pack are discarded face-down from the draft. To reiterate, that’s one first pick, two picks from the other player’s pack, and then two last cards from the pack you opened before discarding the remaining two cards from the draft. Players continue this process until all eight of their packs have been drafted. From here players add any number of basic lands to their deck and play some 40-card Limited Magic.

I’ve found this to be a really fun way to draft with some amount of hidden information that also involves navigating drafting packs against the other player that emulates a traditional booster draft better than other two-player draft formats. This process could also be done face up, and I imagine some players would prefer that, though I’ve been enjoying the face down draft a lot and haven’t been interested in trying face up.

This Cube and this draft style have led to a lot of really fun games with two- and three-color decks, and I’m excited to play more with this Cube. It’s a great way to scratch the Cube itch in this era when Magic exists absent the gathering, and it’s one I expect to keep in my arsenal for those days when it’s safe to fire eight-player drafts again, but only two or four show up. I’m also excited to explore more varied play experiences with 180-card environments, and I can’t stress enough how much this size improves the two- and four-player experience.