Portability Cube
(425 Card Cube)
Portability Cube
Art by Grzegorz RutkowskiArt by Grzegorz Rutkowski
425 Card Cube3 followers
Designed by hhhhjj
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A cube built for portability, I want to be able to transport everything needed to play this cube in one small box. In service of that:

  • Nothing in this cube uses counters, tokens or any other external game pieces. Don't want to have to spend box space on tokens, dice and so on.
  • All unsleeved, again to not use up unnecessary box space.
  • No double sided cards, since there's no sleeves.
  • Cheap so I'm not bothered by playing without sleeves and I'm okay with it getting damaged.
  • 425 cards, since that's how many fit in the box along with 25 of each basic.

As for how the cube plays
I quite enjoy limited-level magic but hate the bomb rares crashing in and ruining an otherwise perfectly good low power game. This cube is an expression of that, the card strength is kept low and flat to really push the cool, fundamental-focused games this type of magic can lead to.

When building the cube I followed Maro's Nuts and Bolts design outline quite closely, making a spreadsheet design skeleton and ensuring each colour has a certain amount of creatures, noncreatures and various effects to make them all feel correct.

I've made cycling the core backbone of the cube. Losing to a string of poor draws is common in regular limited games, the cycling along with various other tools should hopefully cut down on that. The rest of the cube is then built out from that mechanical core.

Since the cube is built around one mechanic, I haven't planned any explicit prescribed decks. Instead there's a list of mechanics that all interact with each other and the decks players work out from them are completely emergent.


Supported Mechanics:

Cycling
The central mechanic present in every colour with an asfan of almost 4. Players can use the various cycling-matters cards to focus their deck around it, or not go that deep but still enjoy a consistency boost. Every other theme and mechanic supported in the cube is there because it ties in with cycling in some way.

Cards in graveyard matter
A collection of cards and mechanics that all want your graveyard to be stocked, caring about volume, variety or specific types.

Cashing in the graveyard
Cards and mechanics that use the cards in your graveyard, such as exiling or returning. They compete with the previous category as well as each other.

Reanimator
A majority of the large ramp-payoff creatures also have some way to get themselves into your graveyard, making them perfect targets for reanimation effects.

Graveyard Hate
Due to the previous three groups, the graveyard is an important zone for almost all players. This makes interacting with your opponent's graveyard an interesting way to deny some of their power.

Processors
A pet mechanic of mine, caring about your opponent's exiled cards. Players could use exile removal or gravehate to fuel their processing cards, or just let the opponent exile their own stuff.

Deserts
A set of lands with cycling, then a variety of cards that care about the type. These can also tie in with the handful of cards that care about lands in your graveyard.

Domain
The combination of landcycling, dual typed nonbasics and Ash Barrens can make a five colour deck possible if slow. So I thought it'd be funny to throw in a few domain cards to encourage and reward anyone who made it work.

Learn
Without any lessons learn is still a perfectly fine mechanic that lets you cycle away other cards and adds consistency. But since I was putting them in anyway, adding a small lesson package gives the mechanic a bit more texture.

Cards drawn matters
Cards that get some buff if you've drawn multiple cards in the turn, which can be done with cycling or other effects.

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