Pink Sleeves strives for an exciting, inviting experience, even if it's the only way you play Magic.

Play with iconic cards, efficient interaction, plentiful fixing, and inviting build-arounds, with minimal barrier to entry.

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• Eternal: cards from throughout the history of Magic, with no legality or rarity restrictions
• Deciduous: focused on mechanics that Magic has returned to frequently over the years, with room for exceptions
• Baltimore Singleton: no more than one copy of each card, except shocklands
• Normal Limited Rules: 1v1 games, 40 card minimum deck size, 20 starting life, basic lands available post-draft

Draft reports at zoydraft.tumblr.com

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Quick advice from players

• The power level is much higher than retail limited, but not close to Vintage
• Decks with 1, 2, or 3 colours all do well, just draft your lands!
• Make the most of your early turns
• Strong -drops are often the deciding factor, even if it's + drops than lock down the game
• The best decks are synergistic, but it's tough to win without generically powerful cards
• The graveyard matters in a lot of games
• You can see some winning decks here

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A few ways to combine colours

This list is intended to orient new drafters to some strategies available in the cube. It is not exhaustive. Many strategies cross-pollinate, spill into other colours, and can be built multiple ways.

Flicker

Temporarily exile cards to re-trigger enters the battlefield effects

Reanimator

Discard creatures into your graveyard, then bring them back to life for cheaper than you could cast them

Sacrifice

Sacrifice your own creatures (especially if you can get them back!) to get death triggers

Zoo

Attack with creatures! That's the game plan.

Recursion

Keep bringing your little friends back

Graveyard Lands

Dump lands into your graveyard for value

Value

Draw more cards + spend more mana = win more games

Spells

Cast non-creature spells to trigger abilities

Humans

Folks supporting each other and building each other up

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Rules Clarifications Companions

Companion allows you to choose one creature outside your deck as a companion if the restriction on the card is met. You may pay to put it into you hand once during the game any time you could cast a sorcery.

"CARDNAME"

Cards that say "CARDNAME" are referring to themselves

• How to Keep an Izzet Mage Busy returns itself to your hand
• Zyym, Mesmeric Lord triggers when it enters the battlefield

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Pack Sizes, etc.

Cogwork Librarians are available if everyone wants to start with one (recommended).

2 or 3 Drafters

6 packs of 15
Pick 1, pass
Pick 2, discard 2, pass
Pick 2, discard 2, pass
Pick 2, discard 4

4 Drafters

5 packs of 15
Discard the last 7 cards of each pack

5 or 6 Drafters

4 packs of 15
Discard the last 4 cards of each pack

Team draft recommended for 6 players

7 or 8 Drafters

3 packs of 15

9 Drafters

3 packs of 14
(just add 3 cards it doesn't matter that much what they are)

10 Drafters

3 packs of 12

The main motivation for these instructions is to keep the ratio of cards picked to cards seen relatively consistent

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Hall of Salt

Cards that were in the list, but were cut because players hated them

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History

Initially assembled Autumn 2019 from draft chaff (GRN through ELD) as a way to host drafts without buying packs. Then COVID happened and cube became my main hobby...

Vision

My design choices are guided by two questions:

The first question speaks to a kind of completeness: how can I include as much of what I love about this game as possible? How do I keep it fresh and interesting draft after draft?

The second adds in a greater need for accessibility: how can I lower the barriers to entry as much as possible? If I assume someone knows how to play the game, but won't know all the cards, how do I create the best possible experience for them?

Gameplay & Power Level

I'm striving for a Spikey Jenny environment: efficient spells, but with room for cute synergies to shine.

• Lands including Shocklands and other duals that can come in untapped, but without fetches to supercharge them.
• Mana doesn't get faster than Mind Stone or Birds of Paradise
• Interaction is near the peak of power, but all of it needs mana (e.g. no Fireblast, no Force of Will).
• Effect Density is closer to retail ASFAN than hypergeometric-style redundancy
• Aggro has countless avenues to win on turn 4 if left unopposed
• Cheat can go off on turn two, but it takes stars aligning: Death is the premiere cheat spell, but there's no Entomb to help out.
• Combo doesn't exist in game-winning or infinite form.
• Power Outliers are allowed until they prove they're not fun.

Accessibility

The play group includes less enfranchised players (including me, tbh), and I want to design a good experience for them. On top of that, designing for accessibility tends to benefit all players, even if it narrows the design space. The main accessibility trap in cube design I see is hidden information that hasn't been purposefully designed in. That is: not knowing what's in your opponents' hand is fun and important to Magic, not knowing what a card does is not. Some specific examples:

• No double-faced cards
• Reduce memory issues: the board state should be self-explanatory, and without an excess of special counters.
• Aversion to unexplained keywords. *Special aesthetic cards tend to be the exception, but too many have snuck in for my tastes.
• Avoid additive distraction. Don't make players parse bad/irrelevant abilities.
• Make sure complexity is justified. Sometimes complexity is fun, sometimes a card is just inelegant. I think it's okay to have an essay in a pack, as long as almost every other card can be grokked a lot quicker.
• Avoiding setting traps: payoffs should only exist for strategies that are supported, even if they'd be justified on their own. When a card says, "whenever this or that happens," there better be a density of those effects.
• Limiting tokens. While there are still many tokens, I have aggressively cut cards that make unique or confusing tokens, where I don't feel the game play suffers for it.

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