Cloned from The AutoBattler Cube

This is a cube to showcase a new variant of Magic inspired by the autobattler game genre. It is designed for any even number of players (best with 2 and 4) and It takes approximately 1-2 hours to play.

Setup

In general, the game will have 4-5 stages, each consisting of three rounds. Each round consists of a DRAFT, BUILD, and PLAY phase. In order to track everything easily:

• Place a STAGE counter in the middle of the table, set to 3.
• Place a ROUND counter in the middle of the table, set to 1.

Additionally, each player starts the game with some initial resources:

• Give each player 7 random cards from the cube.
• Give each player a Treasure Token

Then, you may start the game. It begins in the BUILD phase of the first round (note: this means you do not have a draft phase before your first mini-game)

The Round Loop

DRAFT -> BUILD -> PLAY. Repeat until one player is left as the winner!

DRAFT

At the start of each draft phase, do the following:

• increment the ROUND counter. then, if it is greater than 3, reset it to 1 and increment the STAGE counter.
• give each player a treasure.
• give each player a random card from the cube. If the STAGE is 6 or more, give each player an additional treasure instead (At this point, all players will have a static pool size of 15 cards.)
• deal a "pack" of 5 cards to each player.

During the draft, a player can take any of the following actions any number of times:

• [buy] Swap a card in their pool with a card in the pack.
• [re-roll] Sacrifice a treasure: shuffle 5 cards back into the cube and open a new "pack" of 5 cards.

When a player is done drafting, they do the following:

• Shuffle the five cards left in their "pack" back into the cube.
• If they have more than 5 treasures, discard down to 5 (note: you probably should have re-rolled with that excess instead of just let it disappear)

BUILD

When the draft is complete, players build their starting hands. Each of the following happens in order:

1. Each player selects their starting hand (number of cards = STAGE) from their card pool. Libraries are empty.
2. Each player places 3 basic lands of their choice and all of their treasures on the battlefield.
3. Players are paired randomly for the mini-game.

PLAY

Magic Mini-Games are played just like a normal Bo1 game of magic, but with the following rule modifications:

• Starting life = 10
• Starting hand size is equal to the STAGE.
• You do not lose for drawing a card when your library is empty.
• The player with the most poison counters chooses to play or draw. If it is a tie OR there are only two players left, determine randomly.
• The loser of the mini-game gets a number of poison counters depending on the STAGE. A draw counts as a loss for both players.

At the end of a mini-game, players with treasures on their side of the battlefield get to keep up to five treasures. Then, as long as at least two players have less than 10 poison, begin the draft phase of the next round loop.

Additional Rules Poison Counter Progression

The amount of poison counters a player gets when they lose depends on the STAGE. Currently we play with the following progression:

3: 1 poison
4: 1 poison
5: 2 poison
6: 3 poison
7: 5 poison

Yes, this is the Fibonacci sequence

NOTE: you can also play where every loss just gives 2 poison counters. This leads to a slightly faster game with different pacing.

Pairing Players Randomly

It's critical that you never know exactly who you're playing against, but it's also unfun to play against the same person a few times in a row. Because of this, the following is how I recommend pairing, since it can be implemented in paper with a single D20 die roll:

1. Any player can roll the D20. It doesn't matter which player.
2. Before they roll, they assign the two players they didn't just play Even and Odds, respectively.
3. If they roll a 1 or 20, they play their most recent opponent.

This yields 10% to replay your last opponent and 45% to replay each other player. It also doesn't have any randomness issues with using a spin down!

Lastly, if it's the first mini-game, just play the person sitting across from you.

Mini-Game Concessions

Concessions are not allowed. Mini-games determine access to treasures, and your opponent conceding can ruin your economy. Play it out!

What Happens When a Player Dies

When the first player dies, they are now "The Ghost". They continue to play as normal until a second player dies. Once two players are dead, the game should be played just with the final two players.

Some extra rules with the purpose of guaranteeing there is a top2:

1. The Ghost cannot determine the end of a game. If two players die at the same time, and that would determine a winner of the entire game, the eliminated players face off against eachother to decide who plays the finals.
2. If a draw would eliminate two live players at the same time, those players must continue to play games (without drafting in between) until a winner is decided. If for some reason they cannot, set both to 9 poison.

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And That's The Whole Game!

If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading! I hope you have a pretty good understanding of the game now.

This section is about other things to know, such as

• Niche rules to solve a problem that I didn't want to complicate the description above with.
• Optional rules to add or ways to play.
• Some logistical notes like how to play with 8 players.

Join the Discord

If you like what this cube is about, and want to help us smooth out the rules or build your own, feel free to join the discord dedicated to this new form of magic!

Why are the Mini-Games not "auto"

There are a few reasons for this:

1. I asked a lot of Magic players. The general response was that, while it would be cool, it wouldn't create a game that people would be excited to play and build their own cubes for. People love magic. Creating a new way to play the game they love is preferred over an entire new game that just uses the pieces of cardboard.
2. Simplicity. Getting games to happen automatically would require adding a lot of rules, and introducing a lot of questions. It's a huge win that this game can be picked up by most magic players very quickly.

Excluded Cards

You can play with whatever cards you want. For me, I wanted to exclude all cards that had text that didn't really work with the game. So anything that has to do with drawing a card or mentions the library, I excluded.

Some cards like these would be incredible inclusions. For example Endurance would be fantastic since it would almost play as a mass-eternal-witness. Or Elixir of Immortality, Seasons Past or Nexus of Fate would infinitely loop. However, I excluded any card that would give a player a library to keep things simple and avoid games drawing on via non-deterministic-loops. But if you want to play with them, go for it! (You just might need to create rules for ending games that won’t end, such as by allowing concessions in certain circumstances or forcing draws.)

Additionally, we found that the following types of cards were problematic:

1. Good midrange cards that easily support OTK (e.g. broadside bombardiers
2. Thoughtseize effects, which are especially unfun because without a draw step their impact is massively exacerbated. Be mindful of what discard you include.

Logistics

Honestly, some of the hardest parts of this weren't figuring out game mechanics, but rather how to design a game like an autobattler that could logistically work in person.

Below are explanations of choices and how they solve certain issues we ran into.

Advice For Playing In Paper

1. Designate somebody as "the banker". This person is responsible for making sure, at the beginning of each draft phase, everybody gets treasures and extra cards for their pool.
2. Give each player 3x of each basic land for them to have on the side so they don't have to go to the basic land station.
3. Have some copies of InfiniTokens or tokens that can easily stand in.

How Many Players Does this Work For?

Technically, the game can work for any number of players, but the cleanest numbers are 4 players or 8 players.

The current recommendation is to divide players into groups of four. With more than 4 players, players have to change seats every mini-game to find their opponents if they aren't divided into groups. With just 4, everybody can stay at a small table and jam without moving.

If you have multiple groups of four, there are two ways for how you can choose to run the game:

1. Treat each group of four like a fully isolated game. Each game's winner will play off at a final table.
2. Re-seat players whenever hand sizes increase, which will be 4-5 times per game. Not much more than a normal cube draft + matches.

Where do undrafted cards go?

In an ideal world, cards that are not taken out of packs get shuffled back into the cube after every mini-game. If you can manage this, it would lead to the best gameplay, since if everybody tries to draft Green, then Green will start to feel dry.

However, shuffling sucks, and so I'd recommend doing this only as often as your group sees fit. Probably at least once per stage.

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Optional Modifications

On top of the game rules listed so far, some people have had awesome ideas for extra complexities and modifications. Here are a few that you could choose to play with.

Extra Economic Rewards

Many autobattlers have additional rewards to gain economic advantage. The two most common ones are interest and streaks. Below are possible ways of implementing those. However, it's important to note that this game really cannot have incentives to lose. This is because, unlike a true autobattler, players have agency in the games. So the games can just become very unfun if a player is trying to lose.

• Interest: After every mini-game, if you have X or more treasures, gain an extra treasure.
• Streaks: After every mini-game, if you are on a 3+ mini-game win-streak, gain an extra treasure.

Augments

Most autobattlers have an extra mechanic that makes individual boards powerful and unique. In TFT, these are called Augments. My proposed implementation of augments would be:

• The cube creator curates a list of augments from card types like conspiracies, vanguards, emblems, etc.
• The cube curator determines the power level of augments as "uncommon", "rare", or "mythic"
• At the beginning of the game, roll a D6. If the roll is 1, 2, or 3, the game will be played with "uncommon" augments. 4 or 5 -> "rare". 6 -> "mythic".
• Whenever a player gets more than 5 poison, that player is dealt a pack of 3 augments of the chosen rarity and selects one. The rest are discarded (other players will not be able to see select them).

Items

You can repurpose Aura's and Equipment in a way that binds them to permanents. Not sure the clean way of implementing this in terms of actual game mechanics, but the card types are ripe for it. Probably something like:

when drafting an Aura/Equipment, you may pay treasures equal to its mana value. If you do, that card becomes an "item" and is placed in the command zone.

items have the following text: "when a permanent enters the battlefield under your control, you may put this card onto the battlefield and attach it to that permanent".

Upgrades

You could design "upgrades" as a way to introduce duplicates in a singleton environment. On some condition that is unlikely (and you can strive for via rolling), you can generate a second copy of the card you upgrade. This way the game is still like magic.

If you build a version of this cube that is not singleton, you could create the following mechanic:

If you draft 3x of the same card, exile those cards and receive an upgraded version of the card. We are still unsure what an "upgraded" version would look like.

Changing Basic Lands

It can sometimes feel weird that pivoting can happen so quickly. If you'd like, you can play where you have to pay a treasure if you would like to change your basic lands from what they were during your last mini-game.

Carousel

In order to make the game feel like it has clear phases, you can add a "carousel" after every 3 mini-games (when hand sizes increase). For the Carousel, lay 3 * NUM_PLAYERS cards face up in the center of the table. Snake-draft these cards until each player has drafted three cards.

If you do this, you either should require players to put cards from their pool back into the carousel, or remove the "every player gets a random card from the cube" at the beginning of a draft phase. This way pools do not change in size by adding a carousel.

Fun Ways to Spend Money?

I am currently trying to keep complexity low, but I'm sure there are tons of other things you could let players do with their economy. One example could be "Pay 6 treasures to permanently add an additional basic land on the battlefield".

Anything Else?

If you have any other ideas, feel free to bring them up in the discord! I'd be happy to add them here.