Hello I recently got back into magic sometime in 2014 after not having played since I was in grade school(I'm 32 now). One of the things I was most excited about was all the new formats, and I found my self intrigued by cube in particular. It just made the game seem more balanced if everyone had to pick from the same cards as everyone else. Anyway I decided out of the blue to actually make a cube and I've kinda finished (I think). But still being semi new to the game, even if I am a quick study, I'm sure that while I think it's good it might actually be crap. So I'd love to get some feedback. I think I'm not allowed to list my cube here so here's a link to my cube on cubetutor http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/51541 hopefully that's not against forum rules. Thanks and sorry if this thread is in the wrong place.
What are your goals for the cube? What type of games do you want to have? What sorts of decks do you want to support?
The big thing I noticed was your mana curve. You have very few aggro creatures, and a ton of big 6+ mana cards. If you take a look at your mana curve, you'll see that it peaks at 3, and has a second smaller peak at 6. Most cubes I've seen peak at 1 and steadily decline from there. Cheaper spells allow you to support aggro decks, and help make sure that all decks have things to do in the early game. On top of this you don't have a ton of colourless mana generation, so it will be a lot harder for non-green decks to be able to cast those big expensive spells.
I also noticed a couple cards that reference multiple players. Are you planning on making a primarily mulitplayer cube? If so that changes the dynamics considerably, and moves things outside of my area of expertise.
Thanks for taking a look and for the reply Pellanor. I don't have a set goal per say for the cube. I know that there are cubes that do specific things like token generation or are all one color etc. but I didn't want to make a specialty cube. I wanted it to be a new experience every time I sat down to a draft. So while I do have certain soft tactics in mind as a guide for the five main colors (some admittedly more fleshed out than others) I don't have an overarching goal in mind for the whole cube. I made the cube by following the advice of a youtuber called the professor. In his video he suggested that a beginner should look at another cube and use it as a base or a guideline and I choose Ben's cube as a guideline and tried to get it to semi resemble his while giving it my own spin.
I definitely see what your getting at about my mana curve, and I had looked at it before. But I didn't think that I had too many high cost cards, but you are right I definitely peak again at six. In that same vein I may have too many seven cost cards but I think eight and up look alright.
I thought I had covered mana generation pretty well though with my artifacts. While there are more color generators than colorless I didn't think that would be necessarily a bad thing. After all even if I'm not playing red I'd still pick up a mox ruby if it came up.
As for my multiplayer issue I think you might be referring to the council cards? If so than maybe I misunderstood those cards because I thought they worked better 1V1. I.E. if I play Council's Judgment (I don't know how to link cards sorry) I still get rid of a card because if the other player chooses a different card than he looses two because than the votes would be tied and Coercive Portal is a free draw every upkeep if tied.
Welcome to the forum! It's fine to post questions asking for help with your initial build here, and feel free to post your entire list in the Cube Lists sectionFirst, if you haven't already done so, I recommend checking out Noratora's advice and resources for new cube managers here. Since you're running a powered cube, I particularly recommend checking out the latest Power Rankings, as you'll probably want to run as much as possible from there.
Your overall card quality is generally pretty good, but I agree with Pellanor about the average CMC of what you're running and the lack of aggressive one and 2 drops. At your cube's size, you probably want to be running at least 8-9 aggressive (preferably with 2 power) one drops in white, black, and red to give your cube's aggro decks the potential to put control decks on a fast enough clock to keep them from dominating your matches. I recommend cutting some of your 5+CMC cards to make room for more 1 drops in those colors. You're running quite a 5+CMC bigger creatures that fail the Terminate test, so those would probably be good fat to trim (Baneslayer Angel and Kalonian Hydra are the exception).
Your cube is also a bit heavy on multicolored cards, so you'll probably see a lot of them table during drafts and get marooned in sideboards. A good rule of thumb is to run a maximum of 10% multicolored cards, so 6 per guild in your case. You may want to make an exception for hybrid cards, as they go into more decks than even mono-colored cards, I allow each guild up to 2 hybrids if the power level warrants it. Some cube managers also run them in mono-colored slots.
If your cube is designed with multiplayer games in mind, you should probably post questions in the multiplayer/EDH cube thread. Multiplayer cubes are a very different animal from cubes built for dueling.
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The big multiplayer card that I saw was Blade of Selves. Unless I'm reading it wrong, it does nothing in a 1 vs 1 game.
I recommend putting together a list of design goals for your cube. It really helps you choose which cards to include or to cut. wtwlf123 has a great article on his design philosophy, which includes some questions you should be asking yourself. Even if you're not making a specialty cube, you still need to think about what different cards bring to your cube. For example, if you want to support the Tinker deck, you need to be sure to include Tinker, Tutors that can find tinker, cheap artifacts to sacrifice and expensive artifact creatures to cheat into play. If you're missing part of that, then it's impossible to put together the deck. If you have a low number of those cards in a big cube, you might not be able to draft the pieces to put the deck together. Having a list of archtypes you want to support makes this easier to do.
Another friend of mine had a cube that just focused on interesting interactions. Rather than than having a list of archtypes, or focusing on cards that had raw power, he picked cards that played well with others. This required a lot of experience playing different formats to find interactions he wanted to include, as well as a ton of playtesting the cube to find how they worked in practice. This methodology also led to a cube list that was harder to evaluate.
Another thing those goals help with is allowing discussion on your cubes contents. If you want to support a token deck, but aren't running Purphoros, God of the Forge then that's something others can suggest for you. If you don't care about supporting Aggro, then your higher curve isn't an issue. Another example, you're running Bazaar of Baghdad. It's pretty narrow, and is only good in dedicated graveyard decks. If you don't have a lot of other cards to support the graveyard strategy, it will end up being cut almost every time you draft.
On mana generators: You have about the same number of mana generators at 600 cards as I run in my 465 card cube, with a significantly lower curve. I also have full support for Aggro, and other decks that don't care about ramp. That means there's not enough artifact mana to go around, so mana people who draft your cube will try to move into green to be able to cast all the big spells that you have. If you compare your cube to Ben's you can see that he's running 8 more mana producing artifacts than you, which is a significant amount. You also have an average 3.8 mana cost, compared to his 2.98, which is quite the difference.
If you're looking for sample cubes, I'd also recommend wtwl1f23's. He's one of the most respected members of the community here, and I use his list as a test for my cuts / inclusions. I don't get to playtest nearly as much, so if there's a difference in our lists I need to make sure I can justify it based on my design goals, or differences with our play groups. For example, I support the blue devotion/tempo deck as well as the graveyard lands decks, so there's going to be some differences in those ares.
Anyway, his curve is even lower with only a 2.63 average mana cost. Mine's similar at 2.64.
So I read the articles you guys linked me (wtwlf123 was pretty good reading btw)and made some sweeping changes too my cube. Once I was done.
First I cut a lot of my multi color bringing it down to 9.4% overall. Then I added eight more mana producers. I also looked into my Multiplayer issue and cut the Blade of Selves cause Pellanor was right it didn't do anything 1V1. I looked for anything else that might be useless in 1V1 and couldn't find anything though. I still think the council cards have value outside of multiplayer. Am I wrong about that? And are there any other Multiplayer cards that you saw? You only mentioned the one card but both of you made a fuss about my cube being multiplayer.
I then made what to me seemed like an obscene amount of cuts to my higher costs to support the large amount of arrgo I had added. So I'm pretty convinced that my aggro is now more than up to snuff, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though.
I put a lot of effort into balancing my curve. Not too sure I succeeded there though. If I'm reading it right my average mana cost is now 3.2. You kinda made it seem like anything higher than 2 was bad, but honestly I don't know. It seems good to me, I know it did earlier too. But I made a lot of changes and it seems to better fall in line with wtwlf123's guidelines.
First I cut a lot of my multi color bringing it down to 9.4% overall.
That's a big improvement. Is there any reason why you have different numbers of cards in each guild? That does make some color pairs stronger than others. For example, in Golgari you have 7, while in Izzet you only have 3.
Then I added eight more mana producers.
Good, but I only see one complete cycle of mana fixing lands (the Shards/KTK tri-color taplands), so recommend finding room for quite a bit more. I've just added a post to Noratora's guide to new players that explains what kinds of lands and how much you should run here.
I looked for anything else that might be useless in 1V1 and couldn't find anything though. I still think the council cards have value outside of multiplayer. Am I wrong about that? And are there any other Multiplayer cards that you saw? You only mentioned the one card but both of you made a fuss about my cube being multiplayer.
Blade of Selves was the only card that does nothing in a duel, but your cube is also running a lot of cards that I'm only used to seeing in EDH decks and EDH cubes (I play EDH and run an EDH expansion to my cube), but not in duel cubes. Plus, you seem to run a lot of Legendary creatures. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it suggested to me that you might be trying to build dedicated EDH cube.
Another thing that suggested multiplayer to me is that you're running a lot of 4+CMC enchantments that do not have any immediate impact on the board like Lurking Predators, Debtor's Knell, and Martyr's Bond. These usually work well in slower multiplayer environments but are too slow for most dueling formats. I'd trim most of these since you're drafting for duels.
I then made what to me seemed like an obscene amount of cuts to my higher costs to support the large amount of arrgo I had added. So I'm pretty convinced that my aggro is now more than up to snuff, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though.
I count at least 9 two (or potentially 2+) power 1-drops in white, black, and red plus a bunch in green so you've got that slot covered really nicely. I'd get rid of Norin the Wary and maybe Goblin Bushwhacker, though, and run Jackal Pup and Firedrinker Satyr instead. Your black 2-drop spot is looking a bit weak, but you have a great number of 2-drops in other colors. The black 2-drop slot is notoriously hard to fill with aggro creatures, but I'm a fan of Dark Confidant, Asylum Visitor, Oona's Prowler, and Pack Rat. Pain Seer and Blood Scrivener are decent as budget replacements for Confidant.
I put a lot of effort into balancing my curve. Not too sure I succeeded there though. If I'm reading it right my average mana cost is now 3.2. You kinda made it seem like anything higher than 2 was bad, but honestly I don't know. It seems good to me, I know it did earlier too. But I made a lot of changes and it seems to better fall in line with wtwlf123's guidelines.
Honestly, I'd never looked before, but according to Cube Tutor my cube clocks in at 2.67 average CMC and I've been pretty happy with that. wtwlf's cube skews slightly more aggro than mine and his cube is also a powered cube, so I don't have all the free mana rocks to bring my average down. I wouldn't sweat that specific number too much, but once you have enough aggro support I think you'll notice pretty quickly that expensive cards that aren't winning games will go later and later in drafts and you won't mind cutting them to make room for leaner and meaner stuff.
You'll probably notice that there tends to be a broad group consensus on a lot of matters involving cube around here. It's no coincidence that Pellanor's, wtwlf's, and my cube are only a few hundredths of a mana apart in terms of CMC. This is a type of cube a lot of people here have been quite happy with, but don't feel obligated to copy our formats if you don't think it's for you. If you think you and your friends will enjoy playing a different kind of cube altogether with pet cards you love from other formats, then you should do that. The high-powered cube format is a great one, and there are many cool variations of it as well as lower-powered cubes that are tons of fun, too.
One last thing, I'd like to invite you to post in the "Draft the Above Person's Cube" thread. It's a really fun way to check out some of the different cubes that people around here have designed, as well as see what kinds of decks people can build from your cube and collect Cube Tutor data.
I hope all this helps, and if you have any more questions ask away!
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Is there any reason why you have different numbers of cards in each guild? That does make some color pairs stronger than others. For example, in Golgari you have 7, while in Izzet you only have 3.
No not really. The multicolor section was just the one I found to be the most confusing when looking at other cubes. Most cubes I looked at had lands and even monocolored cards with a different color cost ability. I kinda just wanted the room to take away and add once I got more feedback. I figured something I left in would be substandard or wrong or that I would get some recommendations. I've evened it up now.
Good, but I only see one complete cycle of mana fixing lands (the Shards/KTK tri-color taplands), so recommend finding room for quite a bit more. I've just added a post to Noratora's guide to new players that explains what kinds of lands and how much you should run here.
I checked out your post, it was really helpful. I added full set's of ABU dual lands, filter lands, and fetch lands. brought my lands up to 11.5%. Which is kind of on the low end of your 10-15% but does meet it. My AMC including lands is now 2.8 Which I think means I've solved my mana problem.
I'd get rid of Norin the Wary and maybe Goblin Bushwhacker, though, and run Jackal Pup and Firedrinker Satyr instead. Your black 2-drop spot is looking a bit weak, but you have a great number of 2-drops in other colors. The black 2-drop slot is notoriously hard to fill with aggro creatures, but I'm a fan of Dark Confidant, Asylum Visitor, Oona's Prowler, and Pack Rat. Pain Seer and Blood Scrivener are decent as budget replacements for Confidant.
I took your advice and made the changes to red and added Asylum Visitor, Blood Scrivener, Oona's Prowler, and Pack Rat to black. bringing my black aggro 2 drops count up to 11. which seems a little excessive.
Another thing that suggested multiplayer to me is that you're running a lot of 4+CMC enchantments that do not have any immediate impact on the board like Lurking Predators, Debtor's Knell, and Martyr's Bond. These usually work well in slower multiplayer environments but are too slow for most dueling formats. I'd trim most of these since you're drafting for duels.
One last thing, I'd like to invite you to post in the "Draft the Above Person's Cube" thread. It's a really fun way to check out some of the different cubes that people around here have designed, as well as see what kinds of decks people can build from your cube and collect Cube Tutor data.
Drafted your cube and one others. I made a pretty cool graveyard deck out of yours. I posted the results in that thread. Thanks for all the help.
One thing to keep in mind in terms of aggressive drops is that in order for cube aggro decks to win they have to have enormous redundancy in their early drops. It isn't like typical limited where your curve is going to start at 2 and you'll still be able to be the "aggro" deck. Cube aggro decks want the bulk of their creature base to be in the 1-2 mana range so that they have consistent turn 1, 2 and 3 plays every single game. If an aggro deck doesn't lay down threats (or make other meaningful plays) on turns 1 and 2 it probably just won't win. It's also not like constructed where you can jam 4x Goblin Guide and 4x Monastery Swiftspear into your deck, so you need 8 or so individual 1-drops instead of the playsets a constructed deck would use.
All of that comes together to mean that you need a heavy dose of cheap, high-power creatures for aggro in whatever colors you're supporting as aggressive. Keep in mind that at your size only about half your cube would be seen in a given draft if you get 8 people together, and more like a third or a fourth of your cube if you're drafting with a smaller group. So while you might pack 11 aggressive drops into your 2-drop slot and feel like it's an obscene amount, the black aggro drafter might only see 5 of them in any given draft, and some of them he may have to pass up in favor of mana fixing, burn, etc. If you don't start with a surprisingly high amount of aggro support in the pool aggressive decks just end up being anemic and unable to close the game out.
On the flipside, control decks don't really care what their finisher is as long as they get a couple good ones. Their plan to is stabilize against the faster decks first and then draw or tutor into something difficult to deal with to close the game out. Control decks wouldn't run six or seven 6+ CMC creatures even if they had access to them, so adding too many to your cube ends up bogging it down.
Thank you for the insight DSF. Could you clarify something for me though. The first part of your post dealing with aggro was meant to reassure me only right? Or are you of the opinion that I still don't have enough aggro? It was a slightly ambiguous.
On the flipside, control decks don't really care what their finisher is as long as they get a couple good ones. Their plan to is stabilize against the faster decks first and then draw or tutor into something difficult to deal with to close the game out. Control decks wouldn't run six or seven 6+ CMC creatures even if they had access to them, so adding too many to your cube ends up bogging it down.
You are refering only to blue right? Because my white block only has 4 creatures with 6+ cmc with one having a chance to be a 2 cost. And none of the other colors are control.
The number of aggro cards we're recommending probably does seem a bit high, the ratio to shoot for is approximately 2 dedicated aggro cards to 1 dedicated control card. Things like cheap removal tend to fit both strategies and midrange tends to sort itself out with a mix of aggro's better 2-4 drops and control finishers. However, it's a really good idea to dedicate the real estate in your cube so that you have a decent balance of support for aggro vs. midrange vs. control. Without aggro, control decks will tend to dominate leading to slow, grindy matchups that aren't that much fun for anyone who doesn't really love control (and let's face it, who enjoys a control mirror?). For more info on this dynamic (also called "rock-paper-scissors") and how it relates to cube design, check out this thread. The whole thread's really long, but Monkey D Luffy's post at the beginning highlights the key points very well.
I checked out your post, it was really helpful. I added full set's of ABU dual lands, filter lands, and fetch lands. brought my lands up to 11.5%. Which is kind of on the low end of your 10-15% but does meet it. My AMC including lands is now 2.8 Which I think means I've solved my mana problem.
Looking at your cube list, it looks like you're running ABUs, filters, fetches, some manlands, and tri-lands. That's a big improvement, and better quality fixing than I had in my cube for quite some time. I think your 11.5% number is counting all of your lands, but I wouldn't count things like Teetering Peeks or Rogue's Passage towards this number. Also, on your Cube Tutor page I recommend changing the colour profile of your fixing lands lands to match their color identity. You can do that on the "Edit List" page. It makes it a lot easier to see what fixing you have for each color combination, both for yourself, and for other people discussing your cube with you.
Having second thoughts about Aluren and Debtor's Knell though. Not because I think you're wrong but because I personally like them.
I can't say I've ever seen a cube list running either of those, but if you like them, why not? It's your format. There are cool synergies with Aluren in cube, so if those decks come together let us know. I see potential in that card, even though it might be hard to make an Aluren deck some together consistently. Debtor's Knell looks way too expensive at 7 mana, and I'd recommend trying something like Recurring Nightmare, Whip of Erebos, Unburial Rites, or Diabolic Servitude instead for a similar effect at a much lower initial mana investment. Alternatively, you might try something like Academy Rector as a way to cheat it and other game breaking enchantments into play early.
I've noticed that you've been adding cards to your cube without cutting other cards to replace them, so your cube has grown by almost 100 cards since we started discussing it with you. Unless you're trying to support 12-man drafts (with 630 cards), that's probably not a good idea. Ideally, it's a good idea to decide on the maximum number of drafters you expect for your cube, then have 45 cards per player as your limit. My cube is built to support a 10-player draft, so I built a 450 card cube (+15 cards to support Lore Seeker). When your cube is much bigger than necessary, a lot of cards will be left out of the draft, so combos will have no chance of coming together in some of your drafts.
Thanks for drafting my cube! I'll do a draft of yours now.
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Thank you for the insight DSF. Could you clarify something for me though. The first part of your post dealing with aggro was meant to reassure me only right? Or are you of the opinion that I still don't have enough aggro? It was a slightly ambiguous.
On the flipside, control decks don't really care what their finisher is as long as they get a couple good ones. Their plan to is stabilize against the faster decks first and then draw or tutor into something difficult to deal with to close the game out. Control decks wouldn't run six or seven 6+ CMC creatures even if they had access to them, so adding too many to your cube ends up bogging it down.
You are refering only to blue right? Because my white block only has 4 creatures with 6+ cmc with one having a chance to be a 2 cost. And none of the other colors are control.
It was mostly meant to explain the need for a high number, not to criticize your current selections.
As with anything in cube, I think it's important to recognize that what's "right" is what's fun for your playgroup. If nobody wants to play aggro and people want to have long and/or swingy EDH-style games there's no need for aggro 1-drops. If you want to have a rock-paper-scissors type environment the way most mainstream cubes are structured, those early drops are critical.
In that vein I might sprinkle in just a few more cheap aggressive creatures if I were designing your cube. For example, your white section has essentially the same number of actual aggressive creatures as my cube even though you are about 40% larger. Something like Steppe Lynx might be good, especially if you add fetchlands in. On that note, you clearly have some amount of budget to work with or you're willing to proxy, since I see cards like ABU duals, filter lands and Goblin Guide. I would definitely get all 10 fetchlands into your cube and all 10 Ravnica shocklands. That fetch-dual-shock interaction is just the best mana-fixing you can possibly get for a cube. The rule of thumb touted by some people on here like wtwlf123 is to have roughly 10% of your cube be land/mana-fixing, which gives you about 60-65 slots to work with. Most likely that's 5-6 cycles or partial cycles of lands you like, plus some singletons like City of Brass, Maze of Ith, Treetop Village, etc.
Tiny little thing: You have Flooded Grove misclassified in Golgari.
One thing I love about running heavy aggro in cube that no one ever talks about is the typical cost of aggro cards vs control cards. Because cube is a format with the heaviest of hitters from the beginning of the game to the present day, the cost of the cards can be quite high. Most of the very best aggro cards are cheap and easy to find.
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Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.
For more info on this dynamic (also called "rock-paper-scissors") and how it relates to cube design, check out this thread. The whole thread's really long, but Monkey D Luffy's post at the beginning highlights the key points very well.
Stopped in and read most of the first page, and my cube will try to follow the mainstream format of a "rock-paper-scissors" cube. I've accepted the necessity of aggro.
Also, on your Cube Tutor page I recommend changing the colour profile of your fixing lands lands to match their color identity. You can do that on the "Edit List" page. It makes it a lot easier to see what fixing you have for each color combination, both for yourself, and for other
people discussing your cube with you.
All my lands are now matched to thier color identity.
I've noticed that you've been adding cards to your cube without cutting other cards to replace them, so your cube has grown by almost 100 cards since we started discussing it with you. Unless you're trying to support 12-man drafts (with 630 cards), that's probably not a good idea. Ideally, it's a good idea to decide on the maximum number of drafters you expect for your cube, then have 45 cards per player as your limit. My cube is built to support a 10-player draft, so I built a 450 card cube (+15 cards to support Lore Seeker). When your cube is much bigger than necessary, a lot of cards will be left out of the draft, so combos will have no chance of coming together in some of your drafts.
When I started asking for advice on this forum I had 600 cards in my cube. I figured rather foolishly that my cube was near completion. My "plan" was to post my newly made cube on these forums and get some advice on it. I figured you would all look at my awesome new cube and just be blown away at how well built it was. Than maybe tell me some things just didn't work and we would wittle it down to around 580 or so. Instead I came to find out that my cube was sorely lacking in some areas *cough*aggro*cough*. Which meant adding to my already large cube a large number of cards.
Since then I've been trying to balance it to the best of my abilities. But while finding new spells to add to the cube has been great fun, cutting cards that I was excited to put into my cube is like pulling teeth. At the time of typing this I've gotten my cube down to 630 cards. I think I'm completely done messing with my multi color set. My current goal is to just get the mono colors down to around 80 each. Red's already there and is to my mind also completely done. White and green are close at 86 and 82 respectively. With black and blue being my problem children at 92 and 90. Once they're all at 80 my cube will once again be at 600 cards. After that I'll start looking at my colorless and see if there's any wiggle room there. But honestly I think colorless is if anything missing cards, and it's going to be hard to find anything I don't want in my cube. At this point I feel like cutting my cube to be under 600 will be impossible without running into some serious balancing issues.
Now DSF:
It was mostly meant to explain the need for a high number, not to criticize your current selections.
As with anything in cube, I think it's important to recognize that what's "right" is what's fun for your playgroup. If nobody wants to play aggro and people want to have long and/or swingy EDH-style games there's no need for aggro 1-drops. If you want to have a rock-paper-scissors type environment the way most mainstream cubes are structured, those early drops are critical.
Don't worry I didn't take offence I just wanted to be sure I understood before I made any changes. At this point I am trying to make a mainstream cube of rock-paper-scissors. The change of adding aggro has just been a challenge so far.
In that vein I might sprinkle in just a few more cheap aggressive creatures if I were designing your cube. For example, your white section has essentially the same number of actual aggressive creatures as my cube even though you are about 40% larger. Something like Steppe Lynx might be good, especially if you add fetchlands in. On that note, you clearly have some amount of budget to work with or you're willing to proxy, since I see cards like ABU duals, filter lands and Goblin Guide. I would definitely get all 10 fetchlands into your cube and all 10 Ravnica shocklands. That fetch-dual-shock interaction is just the best mana-fixing you can possibly get for a cube. The rule of thumb touted by some people on here like wtwlf123 is to have roughly 10% of your cube be land/mana-fixing, which gives you about 60-65 slots to work with. Most likely that's 5-6 cycles or partial cycles of lands you like, plus some singletons like City of Brass, Maze of Ith, Treetop Village, etc.
Tiny little thing: You have Flooded Grove misclassified in Golgari.
I've re added Steppe Lynx, and Flooded Grove is now classified as Simic. Those were easy changes to make. What gives me pause though is adding in another 15+ lands. I have reservations for a few of reaons. The first is covered pretty well in my earlier response to Spike, I.E. too many cards already. Second I just checked and I currently have 72 lands in my cube. Which is more than you suggest I have, and that brings me to reason three. If I add more mana fixing lands, then I need to make some serious cuts to my flavor lands like Maze of Ith and City of Brass. Is that right or do I have some mana fixing lands that aren't as good that I should replace?
My plan for actually building the physical cube is to just take my finished list to some local game stores to buy everything on the list that's under a dollar. The rest I'm just going to proxy. I figured after that I could start play testing it for a month or two and see what changes need to be made. Than every other month or so throw another $100 at my cube until I've bought everything under five dollars and call it done. I figure having any cards worth more than that in the cube would just be asking for trouble.
When I started asking for advice on this forum I had 600 cards in my cube. I figured rather foolishly that my cube was near completion. My "plan" was to post my newly made cube on these forums and get some advice on it. I figured you would all look at my awesome new cube and just be blown away at how well built it was. Than maybe tell me some things just didn't work and we would wittle it down to around 580 or so. Instead I came to find out that my cube was sorely lacking in some areas *cough*aggro*cough*. Which meant adding to my already large cube a large number of cards.
I've gotta say you're taking constructive criticism like a champ for someone who wasn't really expecting to get much!
Since then I've been trying to balance it to the best of my abilities. But while finding new spells to add to the cube has been great fun, cutting cards that I was excited to put into my cube is like pulling teeth. At the time of typing this I've gotten my cube down to 630 cards. I think I'm completely done messing with my multi color set. My current goal is to just get the mono colors down to around 80 each. Red's already there and is to my mind also completely done. White and green are close at 86 and 82 respectively. With black and blue being my problem children at 92 and 90. Once they're all at 80 my cube will once again be at 600 cards. After that I'll start looking at my colorless and see if there's any wiggle room there. But honestly I think colorless is if anything missing cards, and it's going to be hard to find anything I don't want in my cube. At this point I feel like cutting my cube to be under 600 will be impossible without running into some serious balancing issues.
I can definitely relate to having a tough time finding cuts to make, it's easy to get invested in cards you've already chosen and anticipated playing. It gets even harder once you've won a few games with those cards, but a lean, mean cube makes for some crazy good games. If you ever want help deciding on cuts, post in "This or That" in the Cards and Archetype Discussion subforum. You'll get solid advice there.
There's also nothing wrong with a big cube per se, if you think you're going to have enough players to draft all the cards at least some of the time. Some people even deliberately make their cube a bit bigger than necessary so that they can have some variance in their drafts. New cards will come out, though, and you'll find out about cards you'll want to try. When you do, decide what your weakest, least essential, and/or least popular cards are and cut them.
What gives me pause though is adding in another 15+ lands. I have reservations for a few of reaons. The first is covered pretty well in my earlier response to Spike, I.E. too many cards already. Second I just checked and I currently have 72 lands in my cube. Which is more than you suggest I have, and that brings me to reason three. If I add more mana fixing lands, then I need to make some serious cuts to my flavor lands like Maze of Ith and City of Brass. Is that right or do I have some mana fixing lands that aren't as good that I should replace?
When I say mana-fixing land, I mean land that makes more than one color of mana. City of Brass is a mana-fixing land, and one of the best you can get, you definitely shouldn't cut it. If anything, you want more 5 color fixers. The Vivid lands are good if you want more 5c fixing on a budget. Your 2-color fixing lands are all quite good, and the 3 color fixers you've chosen are better than a lot of ETBT fixing because each one fixes 3 color pairs. That's a smart budget choice, IMHO.
I still recommend adding 2 more cycles of allied fixing and 3 more guilds of enemy fixing, because the Panoramas fix twice as many allied pairs as enemy pairs. The ideal place to looks for cuts for lands is your multicolored cards. This lowers the colored mana burden of your cube, and increases overall versatility of the cards in your cube. After that, look to cutting mono colored cards, and then colorless as a last resort.
Maze of Ith is also a great card, you shouldn't cut, but it's not really helpful to think of it as competing with lands because it doesn't make mana. In both deck and cube building, you should think of it as a colorless spell. The kinds of lands I recommend having at least 10% of are lands that make more than one color of mana.
My plan for actually building the physical cube is to just take my finished list to some local game stores to buy everything on the list that's under a dollar. The rest I'm just going to proxy. I figured after that I could start play testing it for a month or two and see what changes need to be made. Than every other month or so throw another $100 at my cube until I've bought everything under five dollars and call it done. I figure having any cards worth more than that in the cube would just be asking for trouble.
Starting cheap makes sense, you want to make sure you and your friends enjoy drafting cube before you sink too much money into it. If you haven't already done so, definitely check out my list of budget cube cards if you need any more ideas for getting the most bang for your buck. Hopefully in time you'll have a well-established playgroup or game shop where you feel comfortable putting more valuable cards in.
One last thing, most cubes are never really done. New cards come out, and you'll find out about existing cards you'll want to try. I really enjoy tinkering with and tweaking my cube, and you just might find that you will too.
Good luck, and happy cubing!
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465 card Unpowered cube thread. Draft it here and I'll be happy to return the favor.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
Well I think one thing to keep in mind is that you don't have to simply add cards. At this point you can start cutting weaker cards as you add, especially if you have some idea of what the less optimal cards are.
I agree with Spike Rogue money wise and it sounds like you're in a good place with that. I was fortunate enough to have a decent-size collection that translated well into a cube, along with some generous friends that gave me a few cards I was missing. My ABU duals and enemy fetches are still proxies, and there are some high-profile cards I'm doing without for now, like Snapcaster Mage and Dark Confidant. As much as I would love to have all of those at some point, it's not worth it to me to spend the entire price of, say, a new computer game for a single card that may or may not even be opened in a given cube session.
What are your goals for the cube? What type of games do you want to have? What sorts of decks do you want to support?
The big thing I noticed was your mana curve. You have very few aggro creatures, and a ton of big 6+ mana cards. If you take a look at your mana curve, you'll see that it peaks at 3, and has a second smaller peak at 6. Most cubes I've seen peak at 1 and steadily decline from there. Cheaper spells allow you to support aggro decks, and help make sure that all decks have things to do in the early game. On top of this you don't have a ton of colourless mana generation, so it will be a lot harder for non-green decks to be able to cast those big expensive spells.
I also noticed a couple cards that reference multiple players. Are you planning on making a primarily mulitplayer cube? If so that changes the dynamics considerably, and moves things outside of my area of expertise.
I definitely see what your getting at about my mana curve, and I had looked at it before. But I didn't think that I had too many high cost cards, but you are right I definitely peak again at six. In that same vein I may have too many seven cost cards but I think eight and up look alright.
I thought I had covered mana generation pretty well though with my artifacts. While there are more color generators than colorless I didn't think that would be necessarily a bad thing. After all even if I'm not playing red I'd still pick up a mox ruby if it came up.
As for my multiplayer issue I think you might be referring to the council cards? If so than maybe I misunderstood those cards because I thought they worked better 1V1. I.E. if I play Council's Judgment (I don't know how to link cards sorry) I still get rid of a card because if the other player chooses a different card than he looses two because than the votes would be tied and Coercive Portal is a free draw every upkeep if tied.
Thoughts?
Your overall card quality is generally pretty good, but I agree with Pellanor about the average CMC of what you're running and the lack of aggressive one and 2 drops. At your cube's size, you probably want to be running at least 8-9 aggressive (preferably with 2 power) one drops in white, black, and red to give your cube's aggro decks the potential to put control decks on a fast enough clock to keep them from dominating your matches. I recommend cutting some of your 5+CMC cards to make room for more 1 drops in those colors. You're running quite a 5+CMC bigger creatures that fail the Terminate test, so those would probably be good fat to trim (Baneslayer Angel and Kalonian Hydra are the exception).
Your cube is also a bit heavy on multicolored cards, so you'll probably see a lot of them table during drafts and get marooned in sideboards. A good rule of thumb is to run a maximum of 10% multicolored cards, so 6 per guild in your case. You may want to make an exception for hybrid cards, as they go into more decks than even mono-colored cards, I allow each guild up to 2 hybrids if the power level warrants it. Some cube managers also run them in mono-colored slots.
If your cube is designed with multiplayer games in mind, you should probably post questions in the multiplayer/EDH cube thread. Multiplayer cubes are a very different animal from cubes built for dueling.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
I recommend putting together a list of design goals for your cube. It really helps you choose which cards to include or to cut. wtwlf123 has a great article on his design philosophy, which includes some questions you should be asking yourself. Even if you're not making a specialty cube, you still need to think about what different cards bring to your cube. For example, if you want to support the Tinker deck, you need to be sure to include Tinker, Tutors that can find tinker, cheap artifacts to sacrifice and expensive artifact creatures to cheat into play. If you're missing part of that, then it's impossible to put together the deck. If you have a low number of those cards in a big cube, you might not be able to draft the pieces to put the deck together. Having a list of archtypes you want to support makes this easier to do.
Another friend of mine had a cube that just focused on interesting interactions. Rather than than having a list of archtypes, or focusing on cards that had raw power, he picked cards that played well with others. This required a lot of experience playing different formats to find interactions he wanted to include, as well as a ton of playtesting the cube to find how they worked in practice. This methodology also led to a cube list that was harder to evaluate.
Another thing those goals help with is allowing discussion on your cubes contents. If you want to support a token deck, but aren't running Purphoros, God of the Forge then that's something others can suggest for you. If you don't care about supporting Aggro, then your higher curve isn't an issue. Another example, you're running Bazaar of Baghdad. It's pretty narrow, and is only good in dedicated graveyard decks. If you don't have a lot of other cards to support the graveyard strategy, it will end up being cut almost every time you draft.
On mana generators: You have about the same number of mana generators at 600 cards as I run in my 465 card cube, with a significantly lower curve. I also have full support for Aggro, and other decks that don't care about ramp. That means there's not enough artifact mana to go around, so mana people who draft your cube will try to move into green to be able to cast all the big spells that you have. If you compare your cube to Ben's you can see that he's running 8 more mana producing artifacts than you, which is a significant amount. You also have an average 3.8 mana cost, compared to his 2.98, which is quite the difference.
If you're looking for sample cubes, I'd also recommend wtwl1f23's. He's one of the most respected members of the community here, and I use his list as a test for my cuts / inclusions. I don't get to playtest nearly as much, so if there's a difference in our lists I need to make sure I can justify it based on my design goals, or differences with our play groups. For example, I support the blue devotion/tempo deck as well as the graveyard lands decks, so there's going to be some differences in those ares.
Anyway, his curve is even lower with only a 2.63 average mana cost. Mine's similar at 2.64.
Hope this helps
First I cut a lot of my multi color bringing it down to 9.4% overall. Then I added eight more mana producers. I also looked into my Multiplayer issue and cut the Blade of Selves cause Pellanor was right it didn't do anything 1V1. I looked for anything else that might be useless in 1V1 and couldn't find anything though. I still think the council cards have value outside of multiplayer. Am I wrong about that? And are there any other Multiplayer cards that you saw? You only mentioned the one card but both of you made a fuss about my cube being multiplayer.
I then made what to me seemed like an obscene amount of cuts to my higher costs to support the large amount of arrgo I had added. So I'm pretty convinced that my aggro is now more than up to snuff, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though.
I put a lot of effort into balancing my curve. Not too sure I succeeded there though. If I'm reading it right my average mana cost is now 3.2. You kinda made it seem like anything higher than 2 was bad, but honestly I don't know. It seems good to me, I know it did earlier too. But I made a lot of changes and it seems to better fall in line with wtwlf123's guidelines.
What do you think? http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/51541
That's a big improvement. Is there any reason why you have different numbers of cards in each guild? That does make some color pairs stronger than others. For example, in Golgari you have 7, while in Izzet you only have 3.
Good, but I only see one complete cycle of mana fixing lands (the Shards/KTK tri-color taplands), so recommend finding room for quite a bit more. I've just added a post to Noratora's guide to new players that explains what kinds of lands and how much you should run here.
Blade of Selves was the only card that does nothing in a duel, but your cube is also running a lot of cards that I'm only used to seeing in EDH decks and EDH cubes (I play EDH and run an EDH expansion to my cube), but not in duel cubes. Plus, you seem to run a lot of Legendary creatures. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it suggested to me that you might be trying to build dedicated EDH cube.
Another thing that suggested multiplayer to me is that you're running a lot of 4+CMC enchantments that do not have any immediate impact on the board like Lurking Predators, Debtor's Knell, and Martyr's Bond. These usually work well in slower multiplayer environments but are too slow for most dueling formats. I'd trim most of these since you're drafting for duels.
I count at least 9 two (or potentially 2+) power 1-drops in white, black, and red plus a bunch in green so you've got that slot covered really nicely. I'd get rid of Norin the Wary and maybe Goblin Bushwhacker, though, and run Jackal Pup and Firedrinker Satyr instead. Your black 2-drop spot is looking a bit weak, but you have a great number of 2-drops in other colors. The black 2-drop slot is notoriously hard to fill with aggro creatures, but I'm a fan of Dark Confidant, Asylum Visitor, Oona's Prowler, and Pack Rat. Pain Seer and Blood Scrivener are decent as budget replacements for Confidant.
Honestly, I'd never looked before, but according to Cube Tutor my cube clocks in at 2.67 average CMC and I've been pretty happy with that. wtwlf's cube skews slightly more aggro than mine and his cube is also a powered cube, so I don't have all the free mana rocks to bring my average down. I wouldn't sweat that specific number too much, but once you have enough aggro support I think you'll notice pretty quickly that expensive cards that aren't winning games will go later and later in drafts and you won't mind cutting them to make room for leaner and meaner stuff.
You'll probably notice that there tends to be a broad group consensus on a lot of matters involving cube around here. It's no coincidence that Pellanor's, wtwlf's, and my cube are only a few hundredths of a mana apart in terms of CMC. This is a type of cube a lot of people here have been quite happy with, but don't feel obligated to copy our formats if you don't think it's for you. If you think you and your friends will enjoy playing a different kind of cube altogether with pet cards you love from other formats, then you should do that. The high-powered cube format is a great one, and there are many cool variations of it as well as lower-powered cubes that are tons of fun, too.
One last thing, I'd like to invite you to post in the "Draft the Above Person's Cube" thread. It's a really fun way to check out some of the different cubes that people around here have designed, as well as see what kinds of decks people can build from your cube and collect Cube Tutor data.
I hope all this helps, and if you have any more questions ask away!
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
No not really. The multicolor section was just the one I found to be the most confusing when looking at other cubes. Most cubes I looked at had lands and even monocolored cards with a different color cost ability. I kinda just wanted the room to take away and add once I got more feedback. I figured something I left in would be substandard or wrong or that I would get some recommendations. I've evened it up now.
I checked out your post, it was really helpful. I added full set's of ABU dual lands, filter lands, and fetch lands. brought my lands up to 11.5%. Which is kind of on the low end of your 10-15% but does meet it. My AMC including lands is now 2.8 Which I think means I've solved my mana problem.
I took your advice and made the changes to red and added Asylum Visitor, Blood Scrivener, Oona's Prowler, and Pack Rat to black. bringing my black aggro 2 drops count up to 11. which seems a little excessive.
Went ahead and got rid of the three you suggested along with five others. Dictate of Erebos, Death Pits of Rath, Palace Siege, Infinite Reflection, Aluren. Having second thoughts about Aluren and Debtor's Knell though. Not because I think you're wrong but because I personally like them.
Drafted your cube and one others. I made a pretty cool graveyard deck out of yours. I posted the results in that thread. Thanks for all the help.
All of that comes together to mean that you need a heavy dose of cheap, high-power creatures for aggro in whatever colors you're supporting as aggressive. Keep in mind that at your size only about half your cube would be seen in a given draft if you get 8 people together, and more like a third or a fourth of your cube if you're drafting with a smaller group. So while you might pack 11 aggressive drops into your 2-drop slot and feel like it's an obscene amount, the black aggro drafter might only see 5 of them in any given draft, and some of them he may have to pass up in favor of mana fixing, burn, etc. If you don't start with a surprisingly high amount of aggro support in the pool aggressive decks just end up being anemic and unable to close the game out.
On the flipside, control decks don't really care what their finisher is as long as they get a couple good ones. Their plan to is stabilize against the faster decks first and then draw or tutor into something difficult to deal with to close the game out. Control decks wouldn't run six or seven 6+ CMC creatures even if they had access to them, so adding too many to your cube ends up bogging it down.
You are refering only to blue right? Because my white block only has 4 creatures with 6+ cmc with one having a chance to be a 2 cost. And none of the other colors are control.
The number of aggro cards we're recommending probably does seem a bit high, the ratio to shoot for is approximately 2 dedicated aggro cards to 1 dedicated control card. Things like cheap removal tend to fit both strategies and midrange tends to sort itself out with a mix of aggro's better 2-4 drops and control finishers. However, it's a really good idea to dedicate the real estate in your cube so that you have a decent balance of support for aggro vs. midrange vs. control. Without aggro, control decks will tend to dominate leading to slow, grindy matchups that aren't that much fun for anyone who doesn't really love control (and let's face it, who enjoys a control mirror?). For more info on this dynamic (also called "rock-paper-scissors") and how it relates to cube design, check out this thread. The whole thread's really long, but Monkey D Luffy's post at the beginning highlights the key points very well.
Looking at your cube list, it looks like you're running ABUs, filters, fetches, some manlands, and tri-lands. That's a big improvement, and better quality fixing than I had in my cube for quite some time. I think your 11.5% number is counting all of your lands, but I wouldn't count things like Teetering Peeks or Rogue's Passage towards this number. Also, on your Cube Tutor page I recommend changing the colour profile of your fixing lands lands to match their color identity. You can do that on the "Edit List" page. It makes it a lot easier to see what fixing you have for each color combination, both for yourself, and for other people discussing your cube with you.
I can't say I've ever seen a cube list running either of those, but if you like them, why not? It's your format. There are cool synergies with Aluren in cube, so if those decks come together let us know. I see potential in that card, even though it might be hard to make an Aluren deck some together consistently. Debtor's Knell looks way too expensive at 7 mana, and I'd recommend trying something like Recurring Nightmare, Whip of Erebos, Unburial Rites, or Diabolic Servitude instead for a similar effect at a much lower initial mana investment. Alternatively, you might try something like Academy Rector as a way to cheat it and other game breaking enchantments into play early.
I've noticed that you've been adding cards to your cube without cutting other cards to replace them, so your cube has grown by almost 100 cards since we started discussing it with you. Unless you're trying to support 12-man drafts (with 630 cards), that's probably not a good idea. Ideally, it's a good idea to decide on the maximum number of drafters you expect for your cube, then have 45 cards per player as your limit. My cube is built to support a 10-player draft, so I built a 450 card cube (+15 cards to support Lore Seeker). When your cube is much bigger than necessary, a lot of cards will be left out of the draft, so combos will have no chance of coming together in some of your drafts.
Thanks for drafting my cube! I'll do a draft of yours now.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
It was mostly meant to explain the need for a high number, not to criticize your current selections.
As with anything in cube, I think it's important to recognize that what's "right" is what's fun for your playgroup. If nobody wants to play aggro and people want to have long and/or swingy EDH-style games there's no need for aggro 1-drops. If you want to have a rock-paper-scissors type environment the way most mainstream cubes are structured, those early drops are critical.
In that vein I might sprinkle in just a few more cheap aggressive creatures if I were designing your cube. For example, your white section has essentially the same number of actual aggressive creatures as my cube even though you are about 40% larger. Something like Steppe Lynx might be good, especially if you add fetchlands in. On that note, you clearly have some amount of budget to work with or you're willing to proxy, since I see cards like ABU duals, filter lands and Goblin Guide. I would definitely get all 10 fetchlands into your cube and all 10 Ravnica shocklands. That fetch-dual-shock interaction is just the best mana-fixing you can possibly get for a cube. The rule of thumb touted by some people on here like wtwlf123 is to have roughly 10% of your cube be land/mana-fixing, which gives you about 60-65 slots to work with. Most likely that's 5-6 cycles or partial cycles of lands you like, plus some singletons like City of Brass, Maze of Ith, Treetop Village, etc.
Tiny little thing: You have Flooded Grove misclassified in Golgari.
Stopped in and read most of the first page, and my cube will try to follow the mainstream format of a "rock-paper-scissors" cube. I've accepted the necessity of aggro.
All my lands are now matched to thier color identity.
When I started asking for advice on this forum I had 600 cards in my cube. I figured rather foolishly that my cube was near completion. My "plan" was to post my newly made cube on these forums and get some advice on it. I figured you would all look at my awesome new cube and just be blown away at how well built it was. Than maybe tell me some things just didn't work and we would wittle it down to around 580 or so. Instead I came to find out that my cube was sorely lacking in some areas *cough*aggro*cough*. Which meant adding to my already large cube a large number of cards.
Since then I've been trying to balance it to the best of my abilities. But while finding new spells to add to the cube has been great fun, cutting cards that I was excited to put into my cube is like pulling teeth. At the time of typing this I've gotten my cube down to 630 cards. I think I'm completely done messing with my multi color set. My current goal is to just get the mono colors down to around 80 each. Red's already there and is to my mind also completely done. White and green are close at 86 and 82 respectively. With black and blue being my problem children at 92 and 90. Once they're all at 80 my cube will once again be at 600 cards. After that I'll start looking at my colorless and see if there's any wiggle room there. But honestly I think colorless is if anything missing cards, and it's going to be hard to find anything I don't want in my cube. At this point I feel like cutting my cube to be under 600 will be impossible without running into some serious balancing issues.
Now DSF:
Don't worry I didn't take offence I just wanted to be sure I understood before I made any changes. At this point I am trying to make a mainstream cube of rock-paper-scissors. The change of adding aggro has just been a challenge so far.
I've re added Steppe Lynx, and Flooded Grove is now classified as Simic. Those were easy changes to make. What gives me pause though is adding in another 15+ lands. I have reservations for a few of reaons. The first is covered pretty well in my earlier response to Spike, I.E. too many cards already. Second I just checked and I currently have 72 lands in my cube. Which is more than you suggest I have, and that brings me to reason three. If I add more mana fixing lands, then I need to make some serious cuts to my flavor lands like Maze of Ith and City of Brass. Is that right or do I have some mana fixing lands that aren't as good that I should replace?
My plan for actually building the physical cube is to just take my finished list to some local game stores to buy everything on the list that's under a dollar. The rest I'm just going to proxy. I figured after that I could start play testing it for a month or two and see what changes need to be made. Than every other month or so throw another $100 at my cube until I've bought everything under five dollars and call it done. I figure having any cards worth more than that in the cube would just be asking for trouble.
Whew long post. Thanks for all the advice guys.
I've gotta say you're taking constructive criticism like a champ for someone who wasn't really expecting to get much!
I can definitely relate to having a tough time finding cuts to make, it's easy to get invested in cards you've already chosen and anticipated playing. It gets even harder once you've won a few games with those cards, but a lean, mean cube makes for some crazy good games. If you ever want help deciding on cuts, post in "This or That" in the Cards and Archetype Discussion subforum. You'll get solid advice there.
There's also nothing wrong with a big cube per se, if you think you're going to have enough players to draft all the cards at least some of the time. Some people even deliberately make their cube a bit bigger than necessary so that they can have some variance in their drafts. New cards will come out, though, and you'll find out about cards you'll want to try. When you do, decide what your weakest, least essential, and/or least popular cards are and cut them.
When I say mana-fixing land, I mean land that makes more than one color of mana. City of Brass is a mana-fixing land, and one of the best you can get, you definitely shouldn't cut it. If anything, you want more 5 color fixers. The Vivid lands are good if you want more 5c fixing on a budget. Your 2-color fixing lands are all quite good, and the 3 color fixers you've chosen are better than a lot of ETBT fixing because each one fixes 3 color pairs. That's a smart budget choice, IMHO.
I still recommend adding 2 more cycles of allied fixing and 3 more guilds of enemy fixing, because the Panoramas fix twice as many allied pairs as enemy pairs. The ideal place to looks for cuts for lands is your multicolored cards. This lowers the colored mana burden of your cube, and increases overall versatility of the cards in your cube. After that, look to cutting mono colored cards, and then colorless as a last resort.
Maze of Ith is also a great card, you shouldn't cut, but it's not really helpful to think of it as competing with lands because it doesn't make mana. In both deck and cube building, you should think of it as a colorless spell. The kinds of lands I recommend having at least 10% of are lands that make more than one color of mana.
Starting cheap makes sense, you want to make sure you and your friends enjoy drafting cube before you sink too much money into it. If you haven't already done so, definitely check out my list of budget cube cards if you need any more ideas for getting the most bang for your buck. Hopefully in time you'll have a well-established playgroup or game shop where you feel comfortable putting more valuable cards in.
One last thing, most cubes are never really done. New cards come out, and you'll find out about existing cards you'll want to try. I really enjoy tinkering with and tweaking my cube, and you just might find that you will too.
Good luck, and happy cubing!
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
I agree with Spike Rogue money wise and it sounds like you're in a good place with that. I was fortunate enough to have a decent-size collection that translated well into a cube, along with some generous friends that gave me a few cards I was missing. My ABU duals and enemy fetches are still proxies, and there are some high-profile cards I'm doing without for now, like Snapcaster Mage and Dark Confidant. As much as I would love to have all of those at some point, it's not worth it to me to spend the entire price of, say, a new computer game for a single card that may or may not even be opened in a given cube session.