MTG Salvation

Cube is a daunting format for someone with no limited experience, regardless of which draft variant you choose. It's not that hard to get a handle on how to Glimpse properly. Take the card you want, and cut the 2 strongest cards you don't want your opponents to have.

I have yet to test out this format but it sounds like a lot of fun (although it has me rethinking some of the "draft constructs" like dredger).

My cube currently sits at 450 +15 (for lore seeker) but I'm curious how you guys actually run the 4 person version of Glimpse. Do you pair off, or do "pick one burn two" in a small circle of 4 players like a regular 4-man draft? Also, would it mess stuff up significantly if we delved into the burn piles for the last few packs since 450 wouldn't be enough? I'm not sure if I have the means to comfortably jump to 540 just yet.

You just pick 1, burn 2 and pass, 4 players at once, just like regular drafting.

I think recycling burned cards would impact the format in a negative way, so I'd use Glimpse for 2-3 player formats, and wait until you can go up to 540 to Glimpse with 4.

We play burn one, with 7 packs of 12, when there's 3-4 players. It takes a little bit longer but the draft is more fun and the games are better. For years we used to burn one randomly, but burning one like described in this thread made the drafts A LOT better.

It seems like blue would be burned to death in this style of draft.

I'd like to try it out more, but after the first draft, my players don't really want to do it again. They say it takes long enough to decide on one card to take, and adding two more decisions per pick overloads them.

Even if players attack blue, you can still easily draft blue if you want to. You get 9 first picks to build a blue deck from, and even if people are aggressively burning the color, they can't burn out every blue card without making huge draft mistakes.

It adds more decisions to the draft, but we consider that to be enjoyable and skill-testing. But to each their own.

It can definitely be a challenge. Cube Sealed can be pretty daunting though; I think Winston is a really simple format/concept for new cubers, although traditional 90-card Winston piles can be hard to construct consistent 2-color decks with sometimes, and that can be problematic for new players too.

I think that's part of the fun of the format. It's certainly challenging to make to exact right combination of picks & burns (if there is such a thing).

Quote from InCabalTherapy »

That said, I've been into cube for many years, and I still found Glimpse extremely challenging--never sure I'm cutting the right cards. Not a bad thing, just saying.

The first time we Glimpsed we had no idea how to cut cards, it took a bit to figure out how signals kinda worked.

One thing I miss when Glimpsing is the tension of passing really good cards. In non-glimpse when you open Lotus, Recall, Jitte or something ridiculous you have to consider which bomb(s) you are going to pass along. With Glimpse you just burn them.

Yes, but each deck winds up with far more bombs in this format, because you get nine P1 quality cards. You don't want to be passing bombs in a format where that's the case, lol.

A standard 9-player draft is a reasonable sim for what a 3-player glimpse deck might look like, though the quality of the Glimpse deck would be higher.

Hello,
I'm wondering if I could get some advice from some of you cube/glimpse veterans:

I'm putting together my first cube, intended primarily to be played by 2,4, and sometimes 3 people. I've read up on Grid, Tenchester, and Glimpse drafting and have the following questions:

1) How does the complexity level of drafting/decision making differ between these 3 formats? Is one or another better suited for 1st time cubers?

2) Which of these formats produces the highest/lowest powered decks? Do any of these formats make certain archetypes unplayable due to the hate drafting that occurs? Do some of these formats operate better with or without power?

3) What size cube should I build? I would like to control the environment as best as possible but should I just bite the bullet and make it 540 for optimum draft/play experience?

I'm super excited to get this thing started but I'm having a hard time getting a grip on what draft format and what cube size I should be focusing on. Any helpful suggestions would be most welcome!!

Cheers

1) More decision making in Glimpse than in the other formats. It's more complex than the other variants, but as long as people are familiar with the concepts of basic drafting, Glimpses are pretty easy to get a handle on. One you do a couple, it'll be like second nature.

2) Glimpse drafts produce the highest powered decks. The deck quality is arguably higher than regular drafting, despite being a limited-player event.

3) It depends on how you want to draft it. If it's designed for 2-4 Glimpses, I'd suggest going with 540, because a 4-person Glimpse is perfect for that size, and 2-3s work great too. But if you're gonna settle on a different format to draft with for small events, 360-405 is probably better.

Thanks for the insight. I may start at 360 and do some grid drafting until I can work on the card quality of my 540 list. I'm a little worried that I will dilute the cube with crap right now at 540 with what I got. In addition, it will give my friends and I a chance to compare the draft formats once we start Glimpsing.

We tried this last night for the first time with 3 players. All the decks were sweet. The aggro deck got a bit crushed by power, which is a problem I find is sorta-common in powered cubes in general, but still had some serious play.

The biggest surprise was how awesome the Worldknit deck turned out. There were still a few duds, but instead of true 15th-pick cards you *had* to play, getting the choice of your last pick made the deck wayyy smoother.

Definitely a fan of this and what we will be doing with 3 or less players from here on out.

My friend and I did a Glimpse draft Sunday (the first for both of us). I ended up GUR after a first-pick Sarkhan Unbroken. The game I won in our match, Sarkhan and Baby Jace did great work. My friend ended up in Golgari (he also had a Temple Garden but I never saw him play a white card) and he won two games because Hornet Queen is absurd. Definitely a lot of fun and I know we'll do it again. I'd love to set up a 4-man for next time.

So we did a glimpse draft the other night. However, instead of burning two, we randomly discarded two

I thought we were doing this correctly till I came back here and reread the thread.

It was a lot of fun though but next time we will do it correctly

Random discard makes the process easier, but the results are too disproportionate to how an actual draft would work. And of course, it removes a lot of the strategy that makes Glimpse so fun.

I'm curious if anyone has tried a variant with a 360 cube: 4 players, 6 packs of 15 cards each, burn 1 every pick. Thoughts?

I haven't done that, but I'm sure it would work just fine.

It works just fine doing that. I much prefer it to playing with 50% of the pool.

So the burnfour variant could be named Browse drafting ;-)

This seems like an interesting format to try out. Thanks for the idea!

edit: When playing with 4 players, we usually do Tenchester but if we draft 44 boosters (44 picks) our decks actually are TOO consistent, so we draft 36 boosters.
I'm wondering if getting too consistent decks is a possible problem with this format, since you're drafting 45 cards or is it still balanced enough?

The decks are slightly better than a traditional draft. You get more first-pick quality cards, but far less 2-3 pick goodies. So it about evens out, with a slight edge in quality to Glimpse.

Quote from Gesamtkunstwerk »

I'm curious if anyone has tried a variant with a 360 cube: 4 players, 6 packs of 15 cards each, burn 1 every pick. Thoughts?

We did 6 packs of 16 that exact same way when I was at 385. I had to take out Lore Seeker first though