The Smooth Twin Cube (v0.5)
This cube is twinned, which means that in all formats, picking a card gives access to an extra copy of the card.
Blog
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/the-smooth-twin-cube.3620/
Design Goals
The Smooth Twin Cube has the following goals:
- Be optimized for two players
- Quickly get into a game
- Plenty of agency in gameplay
- Fast games - skew aggressive
- Easy-to-jump-in format to teach brand new players with a deck that isn’t boring
- Replayable even for advanced players, offering variety between decks
- Budget so that it can replicated by other people as a board game-like experience
- Stable so that players can apply lessons learned in previous drafts, and to keep replicas easy and cheap to maintain
Formats
In all formats, players get access to four copies of a perfect rainbow land (Nonbasic, T: Add one mana of any color. ETB untapped).
Like this, but with the drawbacks sharpied over:
Primary: Pyramid Draft
Draft with open boosters like Rochester; all cards of a booster are laid out on the table, then players alternate making a certain number of picks before discarding the rest of the pack.
# Packs | # Cards / Pack | Picks | Trash |
---|---|---|---|
4 packs | 3 cards per pack | Each player picks 1 card | Trash last 1 card |
5 packs | 6 cards per pack | Each player picks 1 card | Trash last 4 cards |
4 packs | 9 cards per pack | Each player picks 2 cards | Trash last 5 cards |
Secondary: 3-player Pyramid Draft
Same as the Primary 2-player Pyramid Draft, only with more cards in the packs.
# Packs | # Cards / Pack | Picks | Trash |
---|---|---|---|
4 packs | 4 cards per pack | Each player picks 1 card | Trash last 1 card |
5 packs | 7 cards per pack | Each player picks 1 card | Trash last 4 cards |
4 packs | 11 cards per pack | Each player picks 2 cards | Trash last 5 cards |
Secondary: 4- to 8-player Booster Draft
At 4 or more players, regular booster draft is preferred since it's faster.
# Players | Packs | Final pool | Opened | Seen / player |
---|---|---|---|---|
4 players | 3x 7-card packs | 21 pairs | 84 pairs | 66 pairs |
5 players | 2x 11-card packs | 22 pairs | 110 pairs | 90 pairs |
6 players | 2x 11-card packs | 22 pairs | 132 pairs | 102 pairs |
7 players | 2x 11-card packs | 22 pairs | 154 pairs | 112 pairs |
8 players | 2x 11-card packs | 22 pairs | 176 pairs | 120 pairs |
Card List
The Smooth Twin Cube card list will be generally:
- Relatively aggressive and creature-combat oriented
- Games shouldn’t take long and should be about trading blows continuously, while gaining tactical advantages in each combat.
- Card advantage will be incremental rather than explosive.
- Favor small to medium creatures
- The most common outcome of blocking should be a trade. For that to work, we favor higher power than toughness, building the format around 2/1s, 2/2s, and 3/2s (which all trade with each other), and make creatures with 4 toughness or higher more expensive and less plentiful.
- Budget
- No rarity restriction, but the vast majority of cards will be non-rares, and the rares will be cheap.
- My aim is to stay under 100 USD (as per CubeCobra prices) for the 360 cards (which appears like 50 USD in CubeCobra, but we need two copies of each card).
- Version 0.0.0 cost me 95 CAD (74 USD) for the 360 nonland cards and the 32 sharpied lands.
- Market fluctuations may make some cards expensive in the future, but the low rarity (103 commons, 73 commons, 4 rares as of v0.0.0) makes this less likely. The less synergistic structure also makes it easy to replace more expensive cards.
- Few wordy cards
- Relatively to the average cube this will be a less wordy cube, especially since it is almost a Peasant cube.
- Compared to beginner cubes, the Smooth Twin Cube will be more wordy, as it won’t focus on vanilla or french vanilla creatures, or on running the simplest version of effects.
- Complexity is already reduced by having fewer different cards to read, and by the list being stable.
- Use few types of tokens
- Finding tokens takes some time, and it’s not a smooth experience when playing on paper. Some cards may be worth including tokens for, and we may simplify some tokens, especially by caring only about some specific creature types.
- Minor synergy themes
- Party
- Heroic
- Runes
- Spells
- +1/+1 counters
- Tribal (Warriors, Wizards, Rogues, Clerics)