Regular Cube
Regular Cube
A Cube for lovers of limited!
Regular Cube is just good, clean Magic and it has no hard restrictions or gimmicks. The emphasis is on creature focused strategies with a mix of overlapping synergies.
The Cube is aimed to maximize the experience for both new and invested players. Cards are chosen to be as readable and understandable as possible, while maximizing strategic complexity and fun replayability. Card advantage and raw power are constrained. The name of the game is maximizing value.
Read the blog with detailed updates for more insight into the history and design philosophy. Check out my other cubes for other, less regular designs.
Regular Cube is discussed occasionally on Lucky Paper Radio including an introduction to drafting it in Episode 117. It was also the subject of Episode 35 about grid drafting
Draft Guide
Regular Cube plays similar to a "Master's Set" or a slightly more powerful and synergistic limited draft. It's intended to be accessible. Most cards have a reasonable floor, and the mana-cost curve is low. Drafting with a straightforward limited plan -- prioritizing interaction, card advantage, efficient creatures, and mana fixing -- within any two colors should result in a functional deck.
Most successfully decks are two colors, frequently with a light splash, and take advantage of synergistic strategies. The list includes many themes of different sizes. Most are not large enough to fill up an entire deck. Optimizing multiple is the key to success. You may end up, for example, with a mixture of effects that care about heroic and counters, or zombies and sacrifice, or spells and card draw. Many cards touch on multiple themes and themes tend to spill over into extra colors that leads to more variety in the way themes are expressed.
The environment tends to be quick! Be prepared for your opponents to put pressure on you in the first few turns of the game. Spells that cost 5+ mana might not be the slam dunks they look like.
Mana fixing is asymmetrical around the color pie. It's faster and more efficient in the more proactive Red-White-Green color pairs. But slow fixing often comes with big upsides. There are multiple copies of some generic fixing lands.
Draft Options
The cube is intended for and tested with standard 8 person drafts - 3 packs of 15. For flexibility, it's large enough for 10 players. It also works well and has been tested with 2 player grid drafts, 4 player drafts (4 packs of 11 or 5 packs of 9), and is great to rotisserie drafts.
Design Notes
Goals and Motivations
The goal of this cube is to create as fun, deep, and repayable a limited environment as possible with interesting and interactive gameplay and draft. To create this depth, the cube offers an array of overlapping sets of synergistic cards and build arounds. Player's don't fall into drafting the XY colored deck, but have opportunities to explore multiple directions. Decks will usually end up with multiple mechanical themes creating nuanced deck building. Cards that 'bridge' multiple strategies are prioritized as much as possible in order to fit more strategies while the same number of cards.
Compared to most rarity-unrestricted cubes, the power level is drastically lowered. This might make it look less serious, just for kitchen table novices. But, I maintain there is nothing that makes casting a Lightning Bolt objectively more fun than than a Shock (except maybe nostalgia). At a lower power level we have tremendous flexibility in card choice that enables the kind of gameplay I'm looking for. I approach designing this cube as trying to design and balance a limited format, not as an opportunity to play the most powerful cards the game has to offer. Tammys and Timmys, Jennys and Johnnys, and maybe especially Spikes should find something for them here.
The actual gameplay is closer to special set like Time Spiral or Modern Horizons, with the power level and complexity pushed further. Combat matters, tricks are good, it’s wise to be judicious with your removal, and it’s better to build toward a synergistic strategy than to just draft the 'best' cards.
There are no formal limitations on the cube’s design. All rarities and sets are allowed. I’ll break singleton if there’s a good reason to but will generally avoid functional duplicates. Modern era card design and color pie are prioritized. Uncommon power level is a baseline. There’s also not a fixed number of cards or a formal template for how they are distributed. The cube is maintained around 400 to 450 cards, enough for an 8 person draft with some variation. The extra padding makes adding and removing cards much easier.
Complexity that doesn’t add to fun gameplay is avoided as much as possible. This means cards with trinket text, including effects that don’t play a role in this specific context, are avoided. For example Nebelgast Herald may be a powerful card even in a cube with no other spirits, but players will either expect a spirit theme or underrate it because not all of it's text matters. These comprehension hurdles cognitive space that could be used for something fun. On the other hand strategic complexity is pushed as much as possible to create a deep environment. This means simple effects that can do many things, on their own or combined with other cards, are prioritized. The goal is to make an environment as approachable to newer players (specifically targeting players with some degree of comfort at Premier set drafts), and also offers strategic depth to experienced players.
Card Choices
Two foundational choices are prioritizing lands that ‘do stuff’ and being light handed with one mana spells. The lands let us add even more effects contributing to synergistic strategies and offer more complexity and novelty to board states. The parasitic suite of Jackal Pups and other hyper-aggressive cards doesn’t fit with the maximum synergy / complexity plan so are avoided. I think the inclusion of slow mana and adjusted mana curve hangs together pretty neatly. A big motivator for these and other card choices is also just to do something different from existing cubes in my playgroup.
While overall reduced, I still want to support a range of speeds. The interplay between aggro, midrange, and control is almost as fundamental to the game as the color pie. Aggressive decks may lack the critical mass of hyper efficient cards compared to classic legacy cubes, but can still generate value from pressuring their opponent and generate reach with synergistic strategies. This power level even gives us a rare and exciting opportunity to explore two color aggro decks.
There is fast mana fixing in a few places. Aggressive decks still can’t afford to stumble, which makes good fixing critical if we’re trying to support two color decks. Aggressive pairs get faster fixing. There, I fixed it. There is also a healthy helping of Prismatic Vista. While a full suite of fetches and shocks takes up a lot of space I want to instead fill with land folks, I do like the interactions fetch lands have with landfall and deck manipulation. The Vistas fill that role while being less of a roulette in the draft. I had initially included a set of Evolving Wilds, but discovered quickly there was not only a difference in power level, but also in gameplay. You were obligated to play and activate Evolving Wilds as soon as possible, meaning you couldn’t keep them in your hand to take advantage of any of those synergies they were supposed to be there for. So here we are with the biggest blight on my almost budget friendly cube.
So what about these synergies and bridge cards? The prime example is Weaponcraft Enthusiast. The effect is, on its face, a pretty simple choice between a 2/3 or three tokens, but it may be effective in a deck for many reasons. It fits in a deck that needs bodies to sacrifice, cares about artifacts or +1/+1 counters, is trying to abuse enter the battlefield effects, or maybe doing a bit of more than one of these. And, because of the targeted power level, if you don't draw any helpful interactions, a 2/3 can still be part of a game of Magic.
A mechanic like Heroic, which is fairly visible, might sound extremely narrow and parasitic, requiring two specific sets of cards to function. Practically speaking this is much more open ended and takes up much less space than may be expected. Only 5 cards actually include the heroic keyword. Flexible cards like Valorous Stance and Integrity // Intervention mitigate the risk of playing combat tricks, divided damage spells like Arc Lightning are great on their own and pointing one damage at your Fabled Hero can turn a combat, and sometimes you even find a way to Dizzying Swoop your way to victory. Once you’re moving in this direction there are related mechanics that benefit from the same enablers. In a similar vein, there isn’t a large set of cards that specifically make up an artifact deck but a small number of payoffs can have a huge effect on your draft and game plan.
The most challenging aspect of this cube’s design has been discouraging “5 color nonsense”. A consequence of a slower format is allowing greedy decks playing the most powerful cards in isolation to be an optimal strategy. In trying to address this, aggressive strategies have become more supported, cards that generate lots of card advantage without building around them have largely been cut, and the power level has overall flattened.
Budget Notes
While this isn’t formally a budget cube, designing at a lower power level does have the side benefit of being relatively affordable. Even for an invested player, a cheap cube is much easier to comfortably toss into your bag as you head to your LGS.
The bulk of the value here is in the lands. The easiest way to cut down the budget further would be to swap them for cheaper alternatives and cut the list down to a tight 360. The zombie theme would be an easy cut with some surprisingly pricy payoffs. To me, the lands are worth while, and a big part of the environment, but I think it would still play with budget options.
In the end it's just a regular cube: no gimmicks, no restrictions, just a lovingly crafted limited environment. If you want to talk cube, you can find me in the MTG Cube Talk Discord, on twitter, and find articles, the podcast, and the cube map at Lucky Paper.
Fal 2024 Update
anthonymattox posted to Regular Cube -
Mainboard Changelist+20, -20
- Mouse Trapper
- Flowerfoot Swordmaster
- Brave-Kin Duo
- Tempest Angler
- Curious Inquiry
- Bitter Triumph
- Peerless Recycling
- Push // Pull
- Scuttling Sentinel
- Eutropia the Twice-Favored
- Commercial District
- Elegant Parlor
- Hedge Maze
- Lilypad Village
- Meticulous Archive
- Raucous Theater
- Shadowy Backstreet
- Thundering Falls
- Undercity Sewers
- Underground Mortuary
- Applied Biomancy
- Legolas, Master Archer
- Feldon, Ronom Excavator
- Ophidian Eye
- Survivor of Korlis
- Yotian Frontliner
- Elvish Hydromancer
- Razortide Bridge
- Earthshaker Khenra
- Temple of Malice
- Temple of Silence
- Temple of Enlightenment
- Temple of Epiphany
- Temple of Triumph
- Temple of Malady
- Temple of Deceit
- Temple of Abandon
- Temple of Mystery
- Bedeck // Bedazzle
- Spellgorger Weird