Art by Airi YoshihisaThis cube is twice the size of the MTGA Jump In collection for Bloomburrow, and it has access to many cards that set does not. But where the Jump In supplement is intended to be mixed with other Jump In sets, this cube is meant to be fully playable on its own.
It is not fully a singleton cube, as some repeats—especially in Common rarity—are required to give each of the 20 packs enough support to function effectively. However there are no repeat Rares, and I'm trying to keep Uncommon and Common repeats to a minimum.
Suggested Drafting StrategyThe ideal drafting scheme for first-time players of this cube is to deal out 5 packs to each player, have them select two packs among them, and shuffle those together into a ready-to-play 40-card deck. This also enables four-player tournaments with a single copy of the cube.
An alternate expert-level strategy that also works for this cube is to deal three packs, select one, and then deal three more packs from which the second pack will be selected. There's a higher risk of unplayable decks with this strategy, but also a higher level of player skill involved and better likelihood that each match will be unique.
I prefer to have the lands pre-added to make the cube as "grab and go" playable as possible, but I allow each player to optionally swap up to two basic lands if they'd like to slightly tweak the mana base.
Design Challenge- Use only Bloomburrow non-land cards
- Feature every two-colour pair and every two-type "Duo"
- Adopt a pack drafting experience where both players are very likely to end up with a synergistic two- or three-colour deck or a less synergistic but more consistent mono-colour deck
| Name | Colour | Primary Mechanic | Feature Card |
|---|---|---|---|
| Birds |   | Flight |  |
| Rats |  | Threshold | |
| Lizards |  | Opponent Life Loss | |
| Raccoons |  | Expend | |
| Rabbits | | Army Buff | |
| Bats | | Spending Life | |
| Otters | | Spells | |
| Squirrels | | Forage | |
| Mice | | Valiant | |
| Frogs | | Bounce | |
| Brave-Kin | | Creature Tokens | |
| Lifecreed | | Lifegain | |
| Lightshell | | Tempo | |
| Skyskipper | | Enters | |
| Daggerfang | | Graveyard | |
| Glidedive | | Life Change | |
| Kindlespark | | Direct Damage | |
| Roughshod | | Speed Beatdown | |
| Bakersbane | | Value Beatdown | |
| Treeguard | | +1/+1 Counters | |
Since this is a strongly typal set with most creatures coming from one of 10 creature types, each having a distinct featured mechanic, an appropriately-curved deck with all the same creature type will usually play well. There are also ten creature type pairings (represented by creature spells with "Duo" in the name), and these could generally be considered very playable pairings. Given this, I've classified each possible pairing in this cube using the following criteria:
Strong: Any two packs sharing a type or a pair of types represented by a "Duo"
Medium: A pair of mono-coloured packs either sharing a colour, a type, or a pair of types represented by a "Duo"
Weak: A three-colour deck sharing a "Duo" type pair or a two-colour deck with no typal synergies
Unplayable: A three-colour deck with no typal synergies
This cube has a total of 190 possible pack combinations, with:
- 30 Strong matches
- 25 Medium matches
- 80 Weak matches
- 55 Unplayable matches
I wrote a rough python script to analyze the possible drafting strategies and make my recommendation for which to use for this cube. See the linked blog post for details, or you can look over the script here.
Here are the results of simulating 100,000 "draw X and choose 2" drafts, categorizing the playability of the best pair(s) in the selected packs using the playability matrix described in the overview:
| Strategy | total_runs | strong_or_better | medium_or_better | weak_or_better | unplayable_or_better |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Draw Three | 100000 | 42161 | 66447 | 98894 | 100000 |
| Draw Four | 100000 | 68505 | 90629 | 100000 | 100000 |
| Draw Five | 100000 | 87067 | 98776 | 100000 | 100000 |
| Draw Six | 100000 | 96052 | 99959 | 100000 | 100000 |
| Draw Three Twice | 100000 | 41557 | 65163 | 98008 | 100000 |
"Draw three" is disqualified immediately, because in roughly 1 in 100 drafts you'll end up with zero "playable" decks in your pool of packs. That doesn't seem like a lot, but having any games that are purely guaranteed to be miserable just feels bad. Beyond that, you'll only end up with a medium-playable deck option 66% of the time and a strongly playable option 42% of the time.
It looks like "Draw Four", "Draw Five", and "Draw Six" are all reasonable. With each you have an over 90% chance of dealing at least a medium-playable pairing. Between the three, I prefer "Draw Five". You have a 98.8% chance of getting at least one medium-playable pairing and a 87% chance of at least one strongly playable pairing. On top of that, between two players you'll only "see" half of the total pool, increasing the variety of decks you're likely to see across multiple plays compared to a "Draw Six" strategy that would allow repeat decks to be picked more regularly. Finally, "Draw Five" allows you to simply deal five packs to each of four players if you'd like to use the cube for tournament-style play.
There's one more draft strategy I like and would recommend for people who are very comfortable with the set and its synergies: "Draw Three Twice"—where you pick one of three packs, then deal out another three, and pick your second pack from among those three. From a purely random perspective, the probabilities here are slightly worse than the "Draw Three" drafting strategy. Where it differs is when you account for player skill in making that first pick, knowing how likely you are to see synergistic pairs between that pack and the next three. There's higher risk/reward factor because picking a two-colour pack gives a slight chance of having only unplayable pairings available in the second three, while picking a mono-colour pack is "safer" but gives fewer chances at a strongly playable deck.
The script I used to generate this analysis is publicly available here.