So I figured it's about time that i built myself a cube, since i've been playing for a while, and have some cards all over the place. The problem is that i'm not really sure where i should start. So far, having taken apart some number of decks and chucked them onto a pile. So far, the pile looks like this:
So it's not 360 cards yet. And I'm not really sure what i should do to continue. Does anyone have any good ideas? Should this be more like an old school cube? or should it be the broken cube? Or something else?
Also, do you guys generally start by differentiating strategies in specific colours? or not? I wasn't sure how to move forwards. I was thinking there could be a blue/black storm combo, UG show and tell/eureka combo, a grixis reanimator, RG lands, WR aggro, UR tempo, UW control, and some sort of artifact prison/aggro. Is that doable?
Find a few cube lists that you like, and imitate the way they're constructed to build a skeleton. Fill in the missing slots with cards you and you playgroup will enjoy and you're good to go.
Make sure to include enough mana fixing lands and don't include too many gold cards. Cheaper, easier to cast cards should get the nod over more expensive and harder to cast stuff. Most importantly, design a list that the people playing it most often will enjoy playing with. It doesn't do you any good to design a list that nobody enjoys playing.
I have a couple of articles in my sig that may be worth a look.
I looked up a few cubes, and took some ideas from them. Then i looked at my collection, and realised i don't have everything on those lists. the only real solid strategy so far is Bx reanimator, GU eureka/show and tell.
Find a few cube lists that you like, and imitate the way they're constructed to build a skeleton. Fill in the missing slots with cards you and you playgroup will enjoy and you're good to go.
Make sure to include enough mana fixing lands and don't include too many gold cards. Cheaper, easier to cast cards should get the nod over more expensive and harder to cast stuff. Most importantly, design a list that the people playing it most often will enjoy playing with. It doesn't do you any good to design a list that nobody enjoys playing.
I have a couple of articles in my sig that may be worth a look.
Cheers, and good luck!
I disagree. Build a cube that you enjoy. What I did was start with someone else's Pauper cube and changed it over time to what I like. That way someone already did all the work for me.
Depending on your color breakdown, you also don't *need* color fixing. When my cube was 360 cards and the colorless/artifact/land section was proportional to colored cards, the most common type of deck was a dual colored deck that was just fine with an 8/9~ split of basics. I drafted a COK Block cube that had zero fixing in it and it ended up being fine, no one really had any issue.
___________________________
Comments like this are a gigantic waste of time
- Mods Overall OP, this entire community and everything written about cube construction over the years is a gigantic waste of time. On one hand, this community will tell you how subjective fun is, and on the other tell you how important consensus is and berate you for daring to suggest Tidal Wave.
Fundamentally, the way draft works is inherently fair and has a smoothing effect. Even if something is broken, everyone had equal access to the cards in question. You could shuffle up a bulk box full of random cards and draft from that and end up with a draft environment that was 80% as good as your average cube or retail draft. Everything else is just kind of window dressing, despite what everyone dog piling me for saying this will claim.
You could start with the MTGO Vintage cube. That's a decent cube, start with that and change it to your liking. You could just take that cube and replace most creatures with something on the level of Urza's Avenger and have a sort of old school low powered environment.
Like, the "framework" of the cube could be real powerful like your mana base and spells, and then your creatures could be real low powered. That's an interesting mix, that's what I aim for in my cube. A card like Tinker is busted sure, but if the best thing one could cheat with it was an Obsianus Golem or whatever, it would be fair.
Hmm.. I think I get what you mean. There’s no right way to make a cube, and the drafting mechanic makes it less unbalanced in general.
In making archetypes tho, I figured it’s more interesting to have colours act in a particular way. Sorta like having white as a weenie colour, and blue as a control colour and so on. I’m worried that all drafted decks would end up looking like mid range goodstuff decks.
Hmm.. I think I get what you mean. There’s no right way to make a cube, and the drafting mechanic makes it less unbalanced in general.
In making archetypes tho, I figured it’s more interesting to have colours act in a particular way. Sorta like having white as a weenie colour, and blue as a control colour and so on. I’m worried that all drafted decks would end up looking like mid range goodstuff decks.
Yeah, when my cube was still a Pauper cube I made red into Goblin Tribal.
I would purposefully avoid good stuff cards then. No Mulldrifter, no flametongue kavu, no Pack Rat or Sprout Swarm, etc. Go out of your way to play divinations and doom blades and disenchants instead of Mully D or Shriekmaw or Acidic Slime.
I have Splice Onto Arcane and spirits matter as a theme in my cube, for example. So I'm playing worse versions of spells just to have an environment with more synergy in it, or to get cards with better art, or to have a little clunkier, less good stuff environment where games are slower and drafting decisions actually matter.
I'm running Violet Pall over doom blade because it's prettier and I don't care that it costs 5 mana, **** it.
I've drafted good stuff cubes before and there isn't really any decision making involved. You're drafting the same on color cards in ranked power order and always slapping the best 23-24 cards from your pile together.
If your deck really needs removal, do you play Pull Under? Maybe. Do you have any other arcane spells to splice onto it? What's your curve like? Are you ramping to 6 mana anyways?
Those types of decisions don't exist with shriekmaw or doom blade or dismember or other top of the line removal spells.
Oh mine is a urza legacy and earlier cube. So plow under et al aren’t really ‘legal’. I do have dark banishing, terror, swords though. Not sure if there should be more removal.
I’ve found that the most powerful turn 1 play in this cube is black lotus, land, juzam djinn.
But the most powerful deck is UR artifacts, with goblin welder, tinker and transmute artifact as enablers, grim monolith, time vault, phyrexian colossus and voltaic key as sorta payoff cards.
I don’t play enough of other people’s cubes to know if mines too good stuff. Is there a way to theoretically see if it’s synergistic or more good stuff?
Oh mine is a urza legacy and earlier cube. So plow under et al aren’t really ‘legal’. I do have dark banishing, terror, swords though. Not sure if there should be more removal.
I’ve found that the most powerful turn 1 play in this cube is black lotus, land, juzam djinn.
But the most powerful deck is UR artifacts, with goblin welder, tinker and transmute artifact as enablers, grim monolith, time vault, phyrexian colossus and voltaic key as sorta payoff cards.
I don’t play enough of other people’s cubes to know if mines too good stuff. Is there a way to theoretically see if it’s synergistic or more good stuff?
Upload your cube to cubetutor and trade some drafts with people. That's a good way to find out.
I'd love to trade some drafts with you, your cube seems like one I'd like. I'm a big fan of old creatures that do weird things.
So I figured it's about time that i built myself a cube, since i've been playing for a while, and have some cards all over the place. The problem is that i'm not really sure where i should start. So far, having taken apart some number of decks and chucked them onto a pile. So far, the pile looks like this:
1 mox emerald
1 mox sapphire
1 mox ruby
1 mox jet
1 mox pearl
1 time walk
1 time vault
1 ancestral recall
1 scrubland
1 volcanic island
1 tropical island
1 underground sea
1 plateau
1 taiga
1 bayou
1 badland
1 tundra
1 savannah
1 flooded strand
1 misty rainforest
1 polluted delta
1 scalding tarn
1 bloodstained mire
1 marsh flats
1 verdant catacombs
1 wooded foothills
1 windswept heath
1 arid mesa
1 cascade bluffs
1 fetid heath
1 flooded grove
1 rugged prairie
1 twilight mire
1 fire-lit thicket
1 graven cairns
1 mystic gate
1 sunken ruins
1 wooded bastion
1 temporal manipulation
1 timetwister
1 wheel of fortune
1 time spiral
1 mox diamond
1 chrome mox
1 lotus petal
1 mox opal
1 tabernacle
1 gaeas cradle
1 phyrexian tower
1 tolarian academy
1 transmute artifact
1 griselbrand
1 jace, the mind sculptor
1 vendilion clique
1 true-name nemesis
1 shallow grave
1 reanimate
1 animate dead
1 worldgorger dragon
1 drain life
1 emrakul, the eons torn
1 sneak attack
1 show and tell
1 gamble
1 urborg, tomb of yawgmoth
1 dark depths
1 karakas
1 karn liberated
1 karn, the silver golem
1 library of alexandria
1 bazaar of bagdad
1 juzam djinn
1 recurring nightmare
1 survival of the fittest
1 aluren
1 dwarven thaumaturgist
1 tradewind rider
1 capsize
1 mana drain
1 counterspell
1 force of will
1 force of negation
1 chalice of the void
1 trinisphere
1 static orb
1 tangle wire
1 thorn of amethyst
1 ethersworn canonist
1 stoneforge mystic
1 sword of fire and ice
1 sword of light and shadow
1 batterskull
1 shaman en-kor
1 nomads en-kor
1 soltari monk
1 soltari priest
1 soltari visionary
1 balance
1 chains of mephistopheles
1 invoke prejudice
1 crucible of worlds
1 cursed totem
1 hurkyl's recall
1 null rod
1 aether vial
1 mishra's workshop
1 moat
1 chaos orb
1 falling star
1 the abyss
1 drop of honey
1 candelabra of tawnos
1 nether void
1 eureka
1 guardian beast
1 imperial seal
1 vampiric tutor
1 demonic tutor
1 demonic consultation
1 lions eye diamond
1 concordant crossroads
1 exploration
1 burgeoning
1 channel
1 jackal pup
1 ball lightning
1 lighting bolt
1 chain lightning
So it's not 360 cards yet. And I'm not really sure what i should do to continue. Does anyone have any good ideas? Should this be more like an old school cube? or should it be the broken cube? Or something else?
Also, do you guys generally start by differentiating strategies in specific colours? or not? I wasn't sure how to move forwards. I was thinking there could be a blue/black storm combo, UG show and tell/eureka combo, a grixis reanimator, RG lands, WR aggro, UR tempo, UW control, and some sort of artifact prison/aggro. Is that doable?
Legacy - Solidarity - mono U aggro - burn - Imperial Painter - Strawberry Shortcake - Bluuzards - bom
Make sure to include enough mana fixing lands and don't include too many gold cards. Cheaper, easier to cast cards should get the nod over more expensive and harder to cast stuff. Most importantly, design a list that the people playing it most often will enjoy playing with. It doesn't do you any good to design a list that nobody enjoys playing.
I have a couple of articles in my sig that may be worth a look.
Cheers, and good luck!
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 49th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from MKM!
Green cards
So this is the list i've gotten up to so far. For multicoloured cards, i had the 5 elder dragon original guys (nicol bolas, chromium et al), progenitus and I'm not sure what else. Maybe a lady orca, sivitri scarzam and princess lucrezia.
I looked up a few cubes, and took some ideas from them. Then i looked at my collection, and realised i don't have everything on those lists. the only real solid strategy so far is Bx reanimator, GU eureka/show and tell.
Legacy - Solidarity - mono U aggro - burn - Imperial Painter - Strawberry Shortcake - Bluuzards - bom
I disagree. Build a cube that you enjoy. What I did was start with someone else's Pauper cube and changed it over time to what I like. That way someone already did all the work for me.
Depending on your color breakdown, you also don't *need* color fixing. When my cube was 360 cards and the colorless/artifact/land section was proportional to colored cards, the most common type of deck was a dual colored deck that was just fine with an 8/9~ split of basics. I drafted a COK Block cube that had zero fixing in it and it ended up being fine, no one really had any issue.
___________________________
Comments like this are a gigantic waste of time
- Mods
Overall OP, this entire community and everything written about cube construction over the years is a gigantic waste of time. On one hand, this community will tell you how subjective fun is, and on the other tell you how important consensus is and berate you for daring to suggest Tidal Wave.
Fundamentally, the way draft works is inherently fair and has a smoothing effect. Even if something is broken, everyone had equal access to the cards in question. You could shuffle up a bulk box full of random cards and draft from that and end up with a draft environment that was 80% as good as your average cube or retail draft. Everything else is just kind of window dressing, despite what everyone dog piling me for saying this will claim.
You could start with the MTGO Vintage cube. That's a decent cube, start with that and change it to your liking. You could just take that cube and replace most creatures with something on the level of Urza's Avenger and have a sort of old school low powered environment.
Like, the "framework" of the cube could be real powerful like your mana base and spells, and then your creatures could be real low powered. That's an interesting mix, that's what I aim for in my cube. A card like Tinker is busted sure, but if the best thing one could cheat with it was an Obsianus Golem or whatever, it would be fair.
Seems like an improvement, haha. I love Banding.
Ignoring what Magic players say isn't the answer, it's listening to what they have to say and doing the exact opposite that's correct.
In making archetypes tho, I figured it’s more interesting to have colours act in a particular way. Sorta like having white as a weenie colour, and blue as a control colour and so on. I’m worried that all drafted decks would end up looking like mid range goodstuff decks.
Legacy - Solidarity - mono U aggro - burn - Imperial Painter - Strawberry Shortcake - Bluuzards - bom
Yeah, when my cube was still a Pauper cube I made red into Goblin Tribal.
I would purposefully avoid good stuff cards then. No Mulldrifter, no flametongue kavu, no Pack Rat or Sprout Swarm, etc. Go out of your way to play divinations and doom blades and disenchants instead of Mully D or Shriekmaw or Acidic Slime.
I have Splice Onto Arcane and spirits matter as a theme in my cube, for example. So I'm playing worse versions of spells just to have an environment with more synergy in it, or to get cards with better art, or to have a little clunkier, less good stuff environment where games are slower and drafting decisions actually matter.
I'm running Violet Pall over doom blade because it's prettier and I don't care that it costs 5 mana, **** it.
I've drafted good stuff cubes before and there isn't really any decision making involved. You're drafting the same on color cards in ranked power order and always slapping the best 23-24 cards from your pile together.
If your deck really needs removal, do you play Pull Under? Maybe. Do you have any other arcane spells to splice onto it? What's your curve like? Are you ramping to 6 mana anyways?
Those types of decisions don't exist with shriekmaw or doom blade or dismember or other top of the line removal spells.
Ignoring what Magic players say isn't the answer, it's listening to what they have to say and doing the exact opposite that's correct.
I’ve found that the most powerful turn 1 play in this cube is black lotus, land, juzam djinn.
But the most powerful deck is UR artifacts, with goblin welder, tinker and transmute artifact as enablers, grim monolith, time vault, phyrexian colossus and voltaic key as sorta payoff cards.
I don’t play enough of other people’s cubes to know if mines too good stuff. Is there a way to theoretically see if it’s synergistic or more good stuff?
Legacy - Solidarity - mono U aggro - burn - Imperial Painter - Strawberry Shortcake - Bluuzards - bom
Upload your cube to cubetutor and trade some drafts with people. That's a good way to find out.
I'd love to trade some drafts with you, your cube seems like one I'd like. I'm a big fan of old creatures that do weird things.
Ignoring what Magic players say isn't the answer, it's listening to what they have to say and doing the exact opposite that's correct.
Hope that works. It's not an amazing cube, but it sure is tough to draft a good deck. I'm not very good at drafting aggro weenie strategies with it.
On the other hand Bx (usually UB or BW) prison is pretty good.
Legacy - Solidarity - mono U aggro - burn - Imperial Painter - Strawberry Shortcake - Bluuzards - bom