WORK IN PROGRESS

Version 2.X Changelog

• Added 180 cards (360 → 540).
  • This will probably be the final total card count. 540 cards offers a lot of variability without making the cube too large or cumbersome to play with.
• Significantly increased the number of artifacts.
  • Artifacts were previously underrepresented. Artifacts are interesting during draft because they can fit into decks of any color. As such they can fill the role of contested picks or filler. Artifacts are also vulnerable to (typically undercosted or value generating) artifact removal. As such, increasing the number of artifacts provides more opportunities for counterplay.
• Added support for artifacts, spells matter, multi-color, and +1/+1 counters archetypes.
  • The cube was (and still is) relatively archetype light. The goal was to avoid “theme deck” drafting and a rigid meta. However, the lack of archetypes and clear "signposts" made drafting somewhat difficult. Further, while there was a good variety in deck diversity in terms of color combinations, games would often involve the same broad archetypes (e.g., aggro mirrors, aggro vs control, etc.). Adding a few more open-ended archetypes will hopefully make drafting more interesting and improve deck diversity.
• Added mono-colored creature lands and utility lands.
  • After drafting, players often had more than enough playable cards and needed to make lots of cuts. Many draft rounds were irrelevant because they would only marginally improve player's decks. Adding powerful lands to the draft pool should reduce the number of "dead" drafting rounds and make cutting cards a little easier.
• Added painlands.
  • In previous iterations, all dual lands were tap lands. This created a clear multi-color / tempo tradeoff, but made it more difficult for aggressive decks to play multiple colors. While two thirds of the dual lands are still tap lands, the addition of painlands should give aggressive or tempo-oriented players the option to play more colors.
• Swapped out signets for talismans.
  • I wanted to create an environment where players were a little more sensitive to their life totals. Both talismans and painlands will help create this environment.
• Small, general, across the board nerfs.
  • These changes will hopefully make the cube slightly more focused on winning through incremental advantage, rather than efficient curve out or high impact midrange strategies.
• Cut all double sided cards.
  • As described below, these cards were generally difficult for beginners to use and didn't make drafting or playing more interesting.

Cube Philosophy

The cube does not have any particular theme. It's relatively budget, moderate power level (i.e., higher than booster draft, lower than constructed or powered cube), and is designed to try and avoid some of the more common “feels bad” moments in Magic. Some design considerations are as follows.

Moderate Power Level

In my experience, high power Magic is often higher variance, more restrictive in terms of deck building and card selection, and typically is more punishing to players who don't have knowledge of the meta and specific card interactions. By contrast, low power Magic is often lower variance, involve less interesting cards and effects, and can lead to fairly boring game-states (e.g., wide unbreakable board stalls). The goal with the moderate power level is to create an environment where people can play with interesting cards, effects, and game-states, but without leading to “random” losses or punishing new players who don't have the cube list memorized.

Light on Dedicated Archetypes

Limited environments with strong archetype support are sometimes fun to play because players sometimes get to play with more coherent, “constructed-style” decks. However, In my experience, limited environments with heavy archetype support can often be less fun to draft, as the drafter is more focused on building (or worse, forcing) a particular archetype, rather than drafting cards "in the moment." Players are sometimes punished for drafting outside the supported archetypes. Additionally, when the archetype support is strong, a meta forms and players frequently see the same match-ups (e.g., twin vs stax, reanimator vs ramp, etc.). Further, in strong archetype environments, there are often more non-games of magic, as players who drafted their archetype well can often overpower players who drafted their archetype poorly. The goal of card selection was to create an environment where there is light support for open-ended archetypes, creating more gameplay variability and giving players direction and the ability to build advantage during drafting, but not so much that a meta forms or that games are won or lost during the draft phase. While recent revisions have generally added more archetype support, the goal is to eventually create an environment that comprises a very large number of small interchangeable synergies, rather than a small number of specific archetypes.

Decision Focused

I avoided adding cards that I believe oversimplify the decision making process in game, primarily the “what do I spend my mana on?” decision. I feel that Magic is usually more fun when this decision is more relevant or more important to the players. Deciding between casting a Compulsive Research and holding up mana for Counterspell is not a complex decision, but it can have a considerable effect on the outcome of the game, and thus players are emotionally invested in the decision that they make. Compare that decision to deciding between casting Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer and Dwarven Trader, which (generally speaking) is not really a decision at all.

There are many cards in Magic that are strong cards (and thus attractive picks) because they are powerful in most gamestates. With such cards, the best decision is almost always “play the good card on curve.” These cards can be broadly categorized into two classes:

1. Best in slot. These are the cards that are just much stronger on average than the rest of the limited pool and often have the ability to win the game on their own. A common example is the planeswalker with constructed stats in booster draft. Such cards are frequently game winning bombs that are extremely difficult to counteract.
2. Easy 2-for-1s. These are cards like Flametongue Kavu, Cryptic Command, creatures with strong ETB effects, etc. Unless a player plays these cards very poorly, they virtually always grant both tempo and card advantage. Outside of higher power environments, these types of cards almost always outperform the “average card” and are very frequently the correct play when available. Even in environments where such effects are common (and not overpowered, relatively speaking), games can often devolve into predictable, uninteresting patterns (e.g., P1 plays a value generating threat to answer P2's value generating threat. The next turn, P2 plays a new value generating threat to answer P1's value generating threat, etc.)

The power level of cards in the cube is relatively low, and there is relatively little variability in the power level of the cards. This generally prevents any decision oversimplification resulting from “best in slot” cards. Further, there are not too many cards that provide strong card advantage (cards that draw as their only function, such as Tidings are obviously exempt). Cards that do provide card advantage usually have a restriction attached, such as Soul Manipulation, which requires an opponent to play a creature spell and a player to have a creature in the graveyard, or combat based cards such as Ruin Raider, Abyssal Specter, Ohran Viper, etc.

Combat Focused

Many creatures were selected to generate value through combat rather than through ETBs or death triggers, and there are a relatively large number of combat tricks. This achieves a few results:

• It generally creates games where players are incentivized to “move the game along” by attacking, rather than creating grindy stall states.
• It makes attacking and blocking decisions a little more interesting. In many Magic formats, optimal attacking and blocking strategies often become very very simplistic, e.g., only block in favorable trades or to prevent death, abuse multi-blocking, etc. By including effects such as combat tricks (incentivizing not blocking) and effects such as ninjutsu (incentivizing blocking) the hope is to create a more dynamic, “bluff-based” combat experience.
• It give players a little more leeway in dealing with threats. Generally, a threat with an ETB effect has to be countered to totally mitigate its value. A threat with a combat based effect can be dealt with using any removal and potentially through combat. Further, a threat with a combat based effect generally gives the defending player an extra turn to address the threat due to summoning sickness.

Life-total Focused

A player's life total is tied to the most common win condition in magic. But in many formats, particularly limited formats, life totals are often irrelevant, as the player who controls the board will often eventually win the game, even if they are operating at a life disadvantage. In many limited formats, the difference between 20 life and 10 life is very little, as is the difference between 10 life and 4 life. This often greatly simplifies combat, as players prioritize card advantage over their life total, and will only chump block when forced to. Many cards were selected from the cube to incentivize players to pay more attention to life totals when making decisions. The cube has a reasonably high amount of reliable burn effects, evasive creatures, pump effects, and haste in order to punish players that play a little too loose with their life totals. Additionally, painlands, talismans, and ping effects mean that players are typically playing with less than 20 life.

Greater Emphasis on Counter-Play

One aspect of most good multiplayer games is the ability to adjust and counteract your opponents strategies. Magic, particularly in constructed, has a fair amount of uninteresting counter-play. Many sideboards are dominated by cards that are extremely effective counter tools, but only in specific match-ups (e.g., Tormod's Crypt, Veil of Summer). This has generally discouraged cube designers from including so called “sideboard cards” in their cubes, as they are difficult to draft and can lead to non-games where they totally hose a players strategy. I believe generally that sideboarding and counter-play are an integral part of Magic, and should be a part of the limited environment. My goal was to add sideboard cards that are generally more moderate in power level (rather than game winning blowouts) and are applicable in a larger variety of game states. Additionally, many creature threats have exploitable weaknesses that encourage counter-play. As an example, there are a large number of one toughness creatures that are weak to pinging effects such as Gelectrode and Orcish Artillery, low damage sweepers such as Volcanic Fallout, and first strike effects such as Akki Coalflinger, as well as cards like Serendib Efreet that are weak to effects like Curse of Chains and Pillory of the Sleepless in addition to normal removal. There are also a fair amount of “moderate” graveyard hate effects, such as Deathgorge Scavenger, Mardu Woe-Reaper, Froghemoth, and Dryad Militant, which can be used to counteract graveyard based decks.
The goal, generally, is that if a player is doing something, an effective countermeasure exists, and that players have the option to draft such countermeasures without greatly weakening their decks.

Not Hostile to Beginners

I distinguish between an environment that is “beginner friendly” and an environment that is not “beginner hostile.” A beginner friendly environment is one that generally inflates beginner win rates. Put another way, it does not offer as many opportunities for experienced players to leverage their experience to win games. Beginner friendly environments often involve cards that are simple, powerful, and easy to use effectively, such as Carnage Tyrant.

There are plenty of cards that are not beginner friendly, but are at the same time not actually hostile to beginners. Chains of Mephistopheles is relatively hard to parse, but if a beginner does parse it, its fairly easy to tell that it is good against opponents who are drawing lots of cards.

By contrast, “beginner hostile” cards, combos, and effects, are things that punish players for their lack of knowledge about the game. These include:

• Dual-faced cards. Dual faced cards typically work best when a player has memorized both faces of the card. When a player has to remove a card from its sleeve to read the other side of the card, while its in their hand, the player is effectively revealing a card to their opponent. Dual faced cards are also harder for new players to draft, as they are harder to evaluate and usually require the same “remove from sleeve” maneuver.
• Face down cards (e.g., foretell, morph). These cards are interesting because they create a limited-scope mind game, much like trap cards in Yugioh. A face down Crush the Weak can be countered by playing a high toughness midrange threat, but that same play is extremely weak to a face down Saw it Coming. This mini-game can be fun, but only if a player is aware of all the available options. A player who is not aware of Saw it Coming cannot play around it.
• Powerful, “unintuitive” combos. Intuition is different for experienced players and beginners. An experienced player knows that a cloning effect (e.g., Splinter Twin), self-mill (e.g., Balustrade Spy), big mana generation (e.g., Channel), extra turn effects (e.g., Nexus of Fate) always have the possibility of being part of a game winning combo, and are likely to draft these cards or play around these cards accordingly. Beginning players do not. A combo like Splinter Twin + Deceiver Exarch is hostile to beginners. A player who does not know the combo cannot figure it out by looking at either card individually. As such, beginners are more likely to pass either of these cards in draft. Beginners are more likely to not keep mana open to deal with their opponent's Deceiver Exarch, because they don't realize that they will lose the game if they can't deal with it. Beginners do not know that they need to counter Channel in Channel + Emrakul, the Aeons Torn but counter Blightsteel Colossus in Channel + Blightsteel Colossus.

The cube does not have a particularly large number of “beginner friendly” cards, but has very little cards that are beginner hostile. The goal is to create an environment where games feel fair to players of all skill levels. The beginner should not play games where they feel cheated (“oh, I didn't know that, guess I lose”), but at the same time, experienced players should not be pulled down by an overly simplistic card pool. The hope is to create a fair environment where beginners can learn and grow into experienced players.

Incremental

In my opinion, games are generally more interesting when they are decided by a moderate to large number of small decisions, rather than a few big decisions. Such games reward consistent good play and are less punishing with regard to individual mistakes. While the cube has a long way to go in this regard, I tried to include more cards that would enable players to win games by accruing a large number small advantages, rather than through a few high impact cards. Examples of small advantages include card quality as opposed to card advantage (e.g, scry, surveil, looting, and investigate effects, rather than straight up draw), tap down as opposed to bounce, small persistent buff effects like +1/+1 counters, incidental damage effects like Searing Blood, Smash to Smithereens, and Flame Spill, and repeated damage effects such as Sulfuric Vortex, Pillory of the Sleepless, Enslave, Obsidian Fireheart, etc. This design consideration was mostly intended for cards at low to mid mana cost. Expensive cards, such as Zetalpa, Primal Dawn, Elder Deep-Fiend, End-Raze Forerunners, etc., still generally have non-incremental effects that are consistent with their mana cost.

Other Design Considerations and Notes

• Hybrid Cards: Each two color combo has a hybrid card. The goal generally was that hybrid cards would be contested picks. For example, Dryad Militant can be played in most decks playing White or Green. It does not require players to play both colors.
• Multi-Color Cards: The intent was for multi-color (gold) cards to typically be more powerful, on average, than similarly costed single colored cards, due to greater difficulty in casting them.
• Multi-Color Fixing: Each color pair has two ETB tapped duals, a painland, and a talisman. Thriving lands are also available. Because multi-colored cards are generally stronger than their single colored counterparts, the quality of a three color pile should typically be much better than a mono-colored deck. Only having access to duals and mana-rocks that are either slow or painful creates a real cost associated with playing multi-color.