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TirelessLoamer1 followerFollow
About
Art by Terese NielsenArt by Terese Nielsen

I built my first cube in 2009, a very normal 360 Powered Vintage Cube.

As cards continued to be printed the cube grew as well. When it finally got to 720, the power level disparity between the best and worst card was so big, I decided to break the cube into 2 environments: "Fair Cube" and "Unfair Cube".

The Concept consisted of having no overlapping cards between the 2 in order to create district power level barriers and to cultivate different experiences.

As time moved on, I was having more and more fun playing the non-powered environment and spent more time iterating on the concept (growing the cube) to the point where I once again wanted to break it into multiple cubes.

By this time we had reached the Pandemic and I had much more time to spend on this project. I came up with the idea of "The Graveyard Cube" and "The Artifact Cube"

After multiple test runs of each, it became clear that each environment had colors that were underperforming. As I was brainstorming ideas to fix the issue, I had friend say "If we don't draft these cards, why are they in here!" This statement both insulted and intrigued me a the same time. What if I just flat out cut a color in each cube? This would give me more space to run more of the cards that people wanted to draft and let me incorporate multiple strategies per color combination.

Fast forward a few years and I still maintain these 3 cubes and don't intend on reincorporating a 5th color into either the graveyard cube or the artifact cube. I have even set out to make a total of 5 cubes, each with 1 missing color based on a theme that the missing color is weak at accomplishing. However, with so many cubes, I can no longer follow my "all cards are cube exclusive" clause that I once had.

My graveyard Cube: Hogaak's Playground (formerly known as Yidris Graveyard Cube) was featured at Cube Con 2024 and was on coverage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de1OjBWbXD4) starting at 4:02:00. At this time the cube was 540 for the event. The single biggest lesson I learned from this experience was: "If people are only going to draft your cube once in their life, you should give them the full experience. Build smaller cubes"

Since then, all of my cubes (except the Powered Cube) have been reduced to a minimal size that has a draft table of 8 players see all the cards in 1 sitting.