Hey everyone. I am building a cube for the first time, and reading up on how to do it. I've decided to build an Innistrad plane cube, with Innistrad, Dark Ascension, Avacyn Restored, Shadows Over Innistrad and eventually Eldritch Moon. I was also thinking of including various cards from other sets that are one theme (like the Magic Origins Innistrad themed cards, as well as Soul of Innistrad from M15), but that will come after. The goal is to be able to run drafts using cards from any of the sets, or all together eventually. Right now I've been collecting up the Shadows cards, as it is the most recent set.
The reason I am going so big, is to mainly get experience with these draft environments, and then maybe pair down the cards to a more appropriate smaller cube later when I know what it is I am looking for. There are 4 of us that will play with it regularly, with at least 2-3 more that want in more infrequently. I can also round up another to fill out 8 if I need to.
Now my main issue is this:
What are the ratios of rarities I should include for a proper draft environment? I cannot find any write-ups that give an appropriate response to this. I have been gathering 4/2/1/1 right now, but for a draft environment, should that be 5/3/1/1 or 4/3/1/1 or even 2 rares and 1 mythic? Is there any other advice anyone can offer if they have done this before?
As well, I heard there was a way to "randomize" the packs to ensure not getting 3 or 4 of a card in one pack, but I can't find the writeup for it again. Something about putting numbers on the sleeves, and shuffling them together based on number or some such.
I was also toying with doing a Ravnica one later as well, but I figured I'd start with Innistrad due to attainability. Khans is also on the short list. (big ideas, whether I will get to them is another story). Thanks for the help.
I was also wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of where I would find what cards from Core sets belong in the Innistrad plane. I know I would like to include cards like Odric, Master Tactician or Avacyn, Guardian Angel and Soul of Innistrad. Those are generally easy to find. But has anyone else done this sort of thing? Or do I just load up the sets in Gatherer and try to pick and choose the Innistrad-flavored cards?
Any help with the above questions or even with the original post would be greatly appreciated.
Since you're drawing from 5+ sets to build your cube, why not just go singleton? I own a Old Rav + RtR block cube, and I had to make painful decisions even at the 450-card level. And that was before checking out the M1x sets for additional on-theme cards.
Are you wanting to do rarity ratios to preserve certain draft archetypes like burning vengeance or Self-Mill or something?
Edit: As for Innistrad-plane cards in core sets, I don't know if there is any specific location to look that up without slogging through search engines for words like "geist" or "avacyn." There might be something in the storyline forums here on mtgs, or maybe on the web somewhere.
I think you guys will probably have to draft something up on cubetutor.com, and seek advice after you've come up with a mostly-complete first draft. I think it's gonna be practically impossible to spitball all of the possible combinations of cards and archetypes available to you, and incorporating the additional dynamic of a rarity ratio scheme.
If I were working on this, I'd probably look at how many individual commons there were in INN and SOI, in each of WUBRG; repeat this process for each color and then do uncommons. After you have the numbers, start selecting slots from INN and SOI to develop your common and uncommon sections. Then figure out if there are any DKA, AVR, and EMN cards that would do the job of INN or SOI cards better. I'd probably aim for about 550 cards total in my common and uncommons. Then select 36-70 rares and mythics as capstones for some of the archetypes or tribes that have emerged from the chaos.
The reason I've recommended INN and SOI as your starting points is because of the confluence between INN's flashback and tribal elements and SOI's madness, delirium, and further refinement of tribes. DKA and EMN should add some additional support for both big set's mechanics. AVR is largely the red headed step child of the blocks ~ and I would only include a small number of cards from that set, as it was a disgustingly bomby set, and one whose mechanics didn't really jive with INN, DKA, or SOI.
I personally have my own method to handle my block cubes and process to make perfect random packs out of it (containing 10 commons,3 uncommons and 1 rare/mythic). If you really want to, and since you aren't the first asking over the MTG Salvation Cube forum, I could write a article about it.
I've had some of the same questions in my head. They're still unanswered
My idea was to go for this spread:
Common - 3
Uncommon - 2
Mythic - 1
Three of each common, two of each uncommon and one of each rare and mythic. This should give you a more powerful draft environment than original Innistrad draft, but I don't see that as a problem.
As for Core set cards, I can help you look for them tomorrow. If you'd like? We can go through all the core sets.
I can say that this spread was good for my custom block cube. With the exception of the rares.
3 common/2 uncommon/2 rare/1 mythic was what I used. 234 unique cards total. It was pretty fun and offered a cool environment. But with any more unique cards than that space/portability became a large issue. So I'm not sure if that's the path you should go down with such a large card pool. You might just want to go the singleton route.
The singleton way doesn't provide the same Limited environment as a 3x of a set draft or 6x of a set sealed. Not at all. Rare would be omnipresent and the set's synergies would be so diluted that you won't be able to feel the same environment you drafted or sealed for real before. I'm not saying it can't be fun, I'm just saying that you can't really call that a set Limited cube. It would then be more of a theme cube.
5 (mythic) rares in each of WUBRG + 10 gold (1 for each guild) + 4 artifacts & lands = 39 cards
Total cube = 542
The rare section can of course be expanded to accommodate more fixing (enemy tap lands and/or SOI allied rare lands), or just more pet cards ~ as long as the colors are still kept in numerical balance.
Personally, I would load up on flashback effects, to support the burning vengeance deck. I would also makes sure to include as many off-color flashback/activation cards as possible (example: rally the peasants, reap the seagraf, ongoing investigation, etc), to encourage more multi-color decks.
It would be a good start. I wouldn't personally go under 4 of each common though. Its is important to keep that in mind if you really want to feel the real Limited environment of the set. In fact, it is real common to have more than one example of a certain card in your pool. I personnally go with 4 to 5 of each common, 2 to 3 of uncommon, 2 of each rare and 1 of each mythic. FWIW, we decided that the number of each common and uncommon varies depending on the powerlevel of the card.
And also, you have to be aware that it isn't just the distribution that is important, it is also the way you make packs. That's the real challenge.
It would be a good start. I wouldn't personally go under 4 of each common though.
I'm just going by what the OP (that never bothered to respond to the thread) set out initially. I'm not building this thing my self (acquiring 2, 3, 4x of all of these cards would be a massive pain in the ass!). Assuming someone actually made this thing, the amount of testing necessary would be so great that I don't think there's much point in pontificating about what a "real" limited experience could or should look like. Even at a 4c/2u/1r distribution, the OP would be looking at 600+ cards. That's enormous!
My block cubes, those that are compose of 3 sets, contain approx. 2250 Magic cards. Yeah that's enormous, I know lol. It can be a pain to assemble, but normally a booster box, a fat pack, a prerelease and a couple of drafts is more than enough for the C and U sections.
EDIT : In fact, I've 5 of them. They are made respectively of INV block, INN block, RTR block, KTK block and BFZ block. I've also both TSP and SHM that are still work in progress. Yeah, I do love sealed and draft too much
I have also been working on an Innistrad plane cube. It is really quite a daunting task. I decided originally to try for a ISD/DKA/SOI singleton proxy powered cube for multiplayer drafts. I feel like the ISD flavor is the best of all of MTG history, and the draft environment created was outstanding. With the current block being Shadows Over Innistrad, I figure that this would be a good place to start.
I started collecting cards by getting a SOI full set minus the mythics just after prerelease. I also collected or dug out of my collection a full set of ISD and DKA minus most mythics. I threw these in sleeves, added proxies for ABUR duals, fetches, shock, bounce, and some other random duals, and added my proxy 9. I shored this up with some Conspiracy cards that were good for multiplayer games, and I also intended to add conspiracy and draft matters cards at some point, and ante cards that I never got to play with when I was a kid, as I find these to be a blast. At this point, I thought that it was ready, and I started drafting.
First came the realization that making it powered was silly and counterproductive. It was swingy, the base power level of the cards in these sets were not close enough to the MTG power 9(10), and it just left people cherry picking or hate drafting. It decreased the fun to have them in there. After I made it an unpowered cube, I tried again.
After unpowering my cube, it played better, but I was able to see that the draft archetypes I expected were not present. It felt like a really crappy themed EDH deck, not what I was expecting. None of the tribes aside from humans was well represented, and there was duplication of some support cards, but it really didn’t hum. I decided that I needed another big tuning of the cube.
I decided that I would edit out all the underperformers, clear out some of the smaller tribes that just took up space, leaving only the most powerful or iconic of the minor tribes' cards. This assured that every card played well with the set. In the process, I removed things like Hounds, most of the wolves and devils, trimmed the Humans, and actually eliminated the Angels. Since I did not have some of the signature angel cards, and the ones left didn’t really interact well with the rest of the tribes, they were cut. I also removed everything that was even close to jank. I also noted some redundancies in capabilities across all the sets, and thought about how much of each of these elements I wanted. When I had adjusted this, I would pick the most exciting, best, or even most synergistic of the duplicated cards, and cut any unneeded cards.
After this, I went through and changed from singleton to a 3/2/1/0-1 rarity ratios of all that remained. This drastically increased the support for each of the major tribes, and recreated some of the feel of the ISD draft environment. Once this was done, I rebalanced everything a little, adding or subtracting elements that were shifted some with changing the rarity ratios. I maintained the 3/2/1/0-1 ratio, but realized that some functions were over represented, and some were under represented. This was corrected with on theme cards from other sets, and allowed me to include some of my pet cards from other sets.
After playing, it was mostly spot on. You can’t get every draft experience that was possible when Innistrad was originally out, but it does recreate the feel, and it is definitely fun. I am waiting on a shipment of some cards I ordered to tweak what I now have, but it is currently workable and quite fun to draft.
The only problem is that it is HUGE! It is not perfectly color balanced, but it currently is about 750 cards! Innistrad has a total of 277 cards, 16M, 59R, 67U, and 135C. With a rarity ratio of 3/2/1/0-1, that is ~614 cards. Shadows Over Innistrad totals 317, 18M, 59R, 100U, 140C, making another ~577 cards, for a total of ~1200 cards, not counting Dark Ascension, duals, or other manafixing! If you go with 4/2/1/1, it would be 1475 cards! As you can see, with about 750 cards, I trimmed a lot.
My next goal is to maybe add the conspiracy and draft matters cards. I love those cards for what they do for a draft. Very fun, and I have high hopes. We will see how this turns out, but I am at least wary of the potential for badness considering how much powering it messed with things in my original cube. If the conspiracy and draft matters cards work out, I may try powering it again, since my cube is no longer singleton, and this may change how things play out.
So after all this, my advice is that you should go with a 3/2/1/0-1 rarity ratio for cards that you do include, don’t include every card from all of those sets, trim the redundancies that exist across the sets, try to maintain a critical amount of cards that enable all of the cool mechanics and tribes, and don’t be afraid to substitute cards not from those sets if it makes it play better, especially if you can still maintain theme. If you go with a different ratio, or insist on every card from every set, then it gets huge really fast. Mine is huge, and I was almost ruthless with my trimming of underperforming cards.
I finally got my cube into CubeTutor today, and spent a little time tuning things up. Drafted a few decks, but the changes were small enough that I can't tell the difference from before I made the tweaks. Anyway, here it is.
Well, now that I'm about 12 cards away from completing my first version of the plane cube (minus Eldritch Moon of course), I cam e back here, and lo and behold a whole lot of helpful responses! Thanks for all this, it has been great reading.
I decided on a 3/2/1/1 ratio so far, and it looks like it "should" work out. I have it all prefect fitted, now just need to buy regular sleeves and get the lands. How many do most people go with for their cube? I will be having 4-8 people drafting at a time, and was wondering if 50 of each basic should be enough.
I will be expecting to cut the chaff from the sets, but as I said, the plan at the beginning is to be able to draft any environment we want (Innistrad only, SOI only, or block draft, or the whole thing!) depending on our moods at the time. That may change after we get more experience drafting, but at least off the start it will give us a variety of options.
For sleeves, I have used MAX Protection for the perfect fit, and they should be fine enough for what I am doing. But for the outer sleeve, how have people found Dragon Shields? I can get the sleeves I need (almost 3000) for about $250 Canadian from my LGS, and was wondering if this is a good enough deal to support them? If I can save $5 or $20 by going online, I would rather support my LGS, but if I can get them (or other higher quality sleeves) from online for radically cheaper, I will go that route.
Right now, the plan is to put a small colored dot on the inner sleeves to aid in sorting quickly and creating packs. How do people do the Dual-Faced cards? Right now, I was going to shuffle them all up and randomly choose 1 per pack to add to it. Should they be different ratios than the 3/2/1?
And Kassow-Rossing, I just saw your post now. I would love to go through the sets sometime to figure out the applicable cards. I think the goal right now is to only use as many cards as would bolster Dark Ascension to Innistrad's size roughly. (40ish Commons, 30 Uncommons, 20 Rares and 4-6 Mythics) as well as to eliminate the reprinted cards from SOI and EMN. I will try and check back here more often, heh.
3/2/1 is the way to go. If you go 4/2/1, sure you can get more variance, but 3/2/1 will give more consistency than 4/2/1. Think about this. How are you going to draft this with 8 people. 3 times tops in a year.
If you go 3/2/1 you are assured that most of the commons will be in the draft pool. Also with block cube 3/2/1 is easier to handle and according to a channel fireball article 3/2/1 is a solid ratio. If you were doing triple Innistrad than I could see 4/2/1
Having only 3 copies of each common avoid the chances of getting multiple in your sealed or draft pool. Going into that direction would bring you far away from a real limited experience. Seriously, I wouldn't refer to what Channel Fireball says about it, it's just maths. And maths don't lie... The ideal would be, in fact, 7 or 8 of each.
And about the «easier to handle» thing, I don't think it's fine to refer to it as a issue. Either 3 or 4 means lot of time to handle the cube. And that's not suppose to be an issue when you decide to build that kind of cube anyway. Also, if you go with a 4/2/1 ratio, it produces more packs, so less frequent handling time. Just saying.
Having experimented in non-singleton, 7 or 8 copies might be mathematically more accurate, but it leads to dreadful environments oversaturated with mediocre cards. You have no idea how tired of Senseless Rage you'll be after two drafts. You simply can't turn it into a sealed pack by changing the numbers. If you want to do that, you'll have to control the rarity with a wonky marking system. 4/2/1 seems a lot better. 3/2/1 gives a more lean 'cubelike' feel. Certainly anything like this is stronger than a sealed pack, but it's hard to get around that.
Another thing you can do is tamper with rarities, giving less playable cards only one or two slots, but letting middle of the road playables have an extra slot or two.
Another thing you can do is tamper with rarities, giving less playable cards only one or two slots, but letting middle of the road playables have an extra slot or two.
That's exactly what we do and it's working so well! Depending on set size, we go from 3 to 5 copies of each common. If the set is a small, we have no choice to go bigger. Dark Ascension, for example, has a 6 to 8 ratio for the commons. We do that because we want 36 packs out of each cube set we have. In fact, it's impossible for a small set like DA to generate enough packs with 4xCommon.
I know it's not specifically what you asked for (it's singleton) but I maintain a generic gothic-horror themed cube. In the very least, you might be able to get some ideas for cards.
As a side note, I personally would define the # of slots a card has based on archetype and decks it goes in, rather than rarity. For example, I'd put Lightning Weaver in the "common" slot.
The reason I didn't do that for mine is because (depending on how far you go, of course) I didn't want those to be the only archetypes. I erred on the side of "good in most decks, but better in this deck." I like players being able to discover new and interesting interactions.
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I also have an Innistrad Cube, but currently only have cards from Innistrad and Dark Ascension as I did not like the Avacyn Restored Direction. I am now looking into picking up all of the cards from the new Innistrad, but am not sure where to go with it.
When I started I did a 3/2/1 mix with some extra cards added to support specific archtypes (extra Burning vengeance sort of things). I have since been cutting cards and am down to what is more of a powered innistrad cube. I have all of the other cards still sleeved, but I started just cutting every last pick from the cube to get cards like favor of the woods out and it eventually powered everything up which I do like. (And it makes shuffling a lot easier.)
Here is a link to my cube on cube tutor: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/18665
I also have an original ravnica cube, which is where I learned singleton is not the way to go for these environments. The cube gets much more playable when you start adding the needed commons and uncommons.
Well, I've played with my cube now a few times, and I must say that every time has been a blast! The last time we had a 12-man draft, and I included a draft-matters card as a 16th card in every pack, along with the normal 10 Commons/3 Uncommons/1 Rare or Mythic/1 Transform card in every pack. The Conspiracy cards definately shake up the draft!
50 basic lands of every type was able to support all 12 players (thank god! Did not relish having to double sleeve more on the fly!).
So far the size hasn't been too unwieldy, with everyone helping to sort out their cards after the draft it went quickly. The longest part was creating the packs at the start, although I got a great tip from another player to use some larger baggies to hold the "packs" to keep them sealed and together.
I will be assembling a Ravnica plane cube at sometime, and I will probably run with a 15th card in the pack being either a gate or a shock-land or the Maze's End as well. I will probably still include gates within the common slots as well, to allow for being able to draft a Maze's End deck.
Now I just have to decide on permanent storage solutions for the cube, being that it, and the Ravnica one, will be extra large (it takes up 2 3-row boxes, nearly full.)
The reason I am going so big, is to mainly get experience with these draft environments, and then maybe pair down the cards to a more appropriate smaller cube later when I know what it is I am looking for. There are 4 of us that will play with it regularly, with at least 2-3 more that want in more infrequently. I can also round up another to fill out 8 if I need to.
Now my main issue is this:
What are the ratios of rarities I should include for a proper draft environment? I cannot find any write-ups that give an appropriate response to this. I have been gathering 4/2/1/1 right now, but for a draft environment, should that be 5/3/1/1 or 4/3/1/1 or even 2 rares and 1 mythic? Is there any other advice anyone can offer if they have done this before?
As well, I heard there was a way to "randomize" the packs to ensure not getting 3 or 4 of a card in one pack, but I can't find the writeup for it again. Something about putting numbers on the sleeves, and shuffling them together based on number or some such.
I was also toying with doing a Ravnica one later as well, but I figured I'd start with Innistrad due to attainability. Khans is also on the short list. (big ideas, whether I will get to them is another story). Thanks for the help.
If you have any comments, or notice any mistakes, please let me know.
Any help with the above questions or even with the original post would be greatly appreciated.
If you have any comments, or notice any mistakes, please let me know.
Are you wanting to do rarity ratios to preserve certain draft archetypes like burning vengeance or Self-Mill or something?
Edit: As for Innistrad-plane cards in core sets, I don't know if there is any specific location to look that up without slogging through search engines for words like "geist" or "avacyn." There might be something in the storyline forums here on mtgs, or maybe on the web somewhere.
"Personally I love high-riak, low-reqars gambles. Life's best with a decent amount of riak. And f*** reqars."
If I were working on this, I'd probably look at how many individual commons there were in INN and SOI, in each of WUBRG; repeat this process for each color and then do uncommons. After you have the numbers, start selecting slots from INN and SOI to develop your common and uncommon sections. Then figure out if there are any DKA, AVR, and EMN cards that would do the job of INN or SOI cards better. I'd probably aim for about 550 cards total in my common and uncommons. Then select 36-70 rares and mythics as capstones for some of the archetypes or tribes that have emerged from the chaos.
The reason I've recommended INN and SOI as your starting points is because of the confluence between INN's flashback and tribal elements and SOI's madness, delirium, and further refinement of tribes. DKA and EMN should add some additional support for both big set's mechanics. AVR is largely the red headed step child of the blocks ~ and I would only include a small number of cards from that set, as it was a disgustingly bomby set, and one whose mechanics didn't really jive with INN, DKA, or SOI.
"Personally I love high-riak, low-reqars gambles. Life's best with a decent amount of riak. And f*** reqars."
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I can say that this spread was good for my custom block cube. With the exception of the rares.
3 common/2 uncommon/2 rare/1 mythic was what I used. 234 unique cards total. It was pretty fun and offered a cool environment. But with any more unique cards than that space/portability became a large issue. So I'm not sure if that's the path you should go down with such a large card pool. You might just want to go the singleton route.
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I'd go with the following, for a 3c/2u/1(m)r cube:
20x3 commons in each of WUBRG + 5x3 artifact + lands = 315 cards
15x2 uncommons in each of WUBRG + 4x2 gold ("Captain" cycle) + 5x2 SOI enemy tap lands cycle, + 10x2 artifacts = 188 cards
5 (mythic) rares in each of WUBRG + 10 gold (1 for each guild) + 4 artifacts & lands = 39 cards
Total cube = 542
The rare section can of course be expanded to accommodate more fixing (enemy tap lands and/or SOI allied rare lands), or just more pet cards ~ as long as the colors are still kept in numerical balance.
Personally, I would load up on flashback effects, to support the burning vengeance deck. I would also makes sure to include as many off-color flashback/activation cards as possible (example: rally the peasants, reap the seagraf, ongoing investigation, etc), to encourage more multi-color decks.
Sample white cards (INN, DKA, AVR & SOI only):
3 Avacynian Priest
3 Bonds of Faith
3 Chapel Geist
3 Dauntless Cathar
3 Doomed Traveler
3 Elder Cathar
3 Elgaud Inquisitor
3 Feeling of Dread
3 Gather the Townsfolk
3 Inspiring Captain
3 Loyal Cathar
3 Niblis of the Mist
3 Puncturing Light
3 Rebuke
3 Seraph of Dawn
3 Thraben Inspector
3 Thraben Sentry
3 Unruly Mob
3 Voiceless Spirit
2 Cloistered Youth
2 Emancipation Angel
2 Fiend Hunter
2 Gryff's Boon
2 Lingering Souls
2 Midnight Haunting
2 Nearheath Chaplain
2 Nearheath Pilgrim
2 Niblis of the Urn
2 Rally the Peasants
2 Reaper of Flight Moonsilver
2 Slayer of the Wicked
2 Spectral Rider
2 Topplegeist
Mythics/rares....
"Personally I love high-riak, low-reqars gambles. Life's best with a decent amount of riak. And f*** reqars."
And also, you have to be aware that it isn't just the distribution that is important, it is also the way you make packs. That's the real challenge.
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I'm just going by what the OP (that never bothered to respond to the thread) set out initially. I'm not building this thing my self (acquiring 2, 3, 4x of all of these cards would be a massive pain in the ass!). Assuming someone actually made this thing, the amount of testing necessary would be so great that I don't think there's much point in pontificating about what a "real" limited experience could or should look like. Even at a 4c/2u/1r distribution, the OP would be looking at 600+ cards. That's enormous!
"Personally I love high-riak, low-reqars gambles. Life's best with a decent amount of riak. And f*** reqars."
EDIT : In fact, I've 5 of them. They are made respectively of INV block, INN block, RTR block, KTK block and BFZ block. I've also both TSP and SHM that are still work in progress. Yeah, I do love sealed and draft too much
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I started collecting cards by getting a SOI full set minus the mythics just after prerelease. I also collected or dug out of my collection a full set of ISD and DKA minus most mythics. I threw these in sleeves, added proxies for ABUR duals, fetches, shock, bounce, and some other random duals, and added my proxy 9. I shored this up with some Conspiracy cards that were good for multiplayer games, and I also intended to add conspiracy and draft matters cards at some point, and ante cards that I never got to play with when I was a kid, as I find these to be a blast. At this point, I thought that it was ready, and I started drafting.
First came the realization that making it powered was silly and counterproductive. It was swingy, the base power level of the cards in these sets were not close enough to the MTG power 9(10), and it just left people cherry picking or hate drafting. It decreased the fun to have them in there. After I made it an unpowered cube, I tried again.
After unpowering my cube, it played better, but I was able to see that the draft archetypes I expected were not present. It felt like a really crappy themed EDH deck, not what I was expecting. None of the tribes aside from humans was well represented, and there was duplication of some support cards, but it really didn’t hum. I decided that I needed another big tuning of the cube.
I decided that I would edit out all the underperformers, clear out some of the smaller tribes that just took up space, leaving only the most powerful or iconic of the minor tribes' cards. This assured that every card played well with the set. In the process, I removed things like Hounds, most of the wolves and devils, trimmed the Humans, and actually eliminated the Angels. Since I did not have some of the signature angel cards, and the ones left didn’t really interact well with the rest of the tribes, they were cut. I also removed everything that was even close to jank. I also noted some redundancies in capabilities across all the sets, and thought about how much of each of these elements I wanted. When I had adjusted this, I would pick the most exciting, best, or even most synergistic of the duplicated cards, and cut any unneeded cards.
After this, I went through and changed from singleton to a 3/2/1/0-1 rarity ratios of all that remained. This drastically increased the support for each of the major tribes, and recreated some of the feel of the ISD draft environment. Once this was done, I rebalanced everything a little, adding or subtracting elements that were shifted some with changing the rarity ratios. I maintained the 3/2/1/0-1 ratio, but realized that some functions were over represented, and some were under represented. This was corrected with on theme cards from other sets, and allowed me to include some of my pet cards from other sets.
After playing, it was mostly spot on. You can’t get every draft experience that was possible when Innistrad was originally out, but it does recreate the feel, and it is definitely fun. I am waiting on a shipment of some cards I ordered to tweak what I now have, but it is currently workable and quite fun to draft.
The only problem is that it is HUGE! It is not perfectly color balanced, but it currently is about 750 cards! Innistrad has a total of 277 cards, 16M, 59R, 67U, and 135C. With a rarity ratio of 3/2/1/0-1, that is ~614 cards. Shadows Over Innistrad totals 317, 18M, 59R, 100U, 140C, making another ~577 cards, for a total of ~1200 cards, not counting Dark Ascension, duals, or other manafixing! If you go with 4/2/1/1, it would be 1475 cards! As you can see, with about 750 cards, I trimmed a lot.
My next goal is to maybe add the conspiracy and draft matters cards. I love those cards for what they do for a draft. Very fun, and I have high hopes. We will see how this turns out, but I am at least wary of the potential for badness considering how much powering it messed with things in my original cube. If the conspiracy and draft matters cards work out, I may try powering it again, since my cube is no longer singleton, and this may change how things play out.
So after all this, my advice is that you should go with a 3/2/1/0-1 rarity ratio for cards that you do include, don’t include every card from all of those sets, trim the redundancies that exist across the sets, try to maintain a critical amount of cards that enable all of the cool mechanics and tribes, and don’t be afraid to substitute cards not from those sets if it makes it play better, especially if you can still maintain theme. If you go with a different ratio, or insist on every card from every set, then it gets huge really fast. Mine is huge, and I was almost ruthless with my trimming of underperforming cards.
WUBSente: The Politics and Metaphor of Stones
My Vampire Hunter Kit Innistrad Themed Cube!
ISD/DKA/SOI Plane Cube
WUBSente: The Politics and Metaphor of Stones
My Vampire Hunter Kit Innistrad Themed Cube!
I decided on a 3/2/1/1 ratio so far, and it looks like it "should" work out. I have it all prefect fitted, now just need to buy regular sleeves and get the lands. How many do most people go with for their cube? I will be having 4-8 people drafting at a time, and was wondering if 50 of each basic should be enough.
I will be expecting to cut the chaff from the sets, but as I said, the plan at the beginning is to be able to draft any environment we want (Innistrad only, SOI only, or block draft, or the whole thing!) depending on our moods at the time. That may change after we get more experience drafting, but at least off the start it will give us a variety of options.
For sleeves, I have used MAX Protection for the perfect fit, and they should be fine enough for what I am doing. But for the outer sleeve, how have people found Dragon Shields? I can get the sleeves I need (almost 3000) for about $250 Canadian from my LGS, and was wondering if this is a good enough deal to support them? If I can save $5 or $20 by going online, I would rather support my LGS, but if I can get them (or other higher quality sleeves) from online for radically cheaper, I will go that route.
Right now, the plan is to put a small colored dot on the inner sleeves to aid in sorting quickly and creating packs. How do people do the Dual-Faced cards? Right now, I was going to shuffle them all up and randomly choose 1 per pack to add to it. Should they be different ratios than the 3/2/1?
And Kassow-Rossing, I just saw your post now. I would love to go through the sets sometime to figure out the applicable cards. I think the goal right now is to only use as many cards as would bolster Dark Ascension to Innistrad's size roughly. (40ish Commons, 30 Uncommons, 20 Rares and 4-6 Mythics) as well as to eliminate the reprinted cards from SOI and EMN. I will try and check back here more often, heh.
If you have any comments, or notice any mistakes, please let me know.
If you go 3/2/1 you are assured that most of the commons will be in the draft pool. Also with block cube 3/2/1 is easier to handle and according to a channel fireball article 3/2/1 is a solid ratio. If you were doing triple Innistrad than I could see 4/2/1
Having only 3 copies of each common avoid the chances of getting multiple in your sealed or draft pool. Going into that direction would bring you far away from a real limited experience. Seriously, I wouldn't refer to what Channel Fireball says about it, it's just maths. And maths don't lie... The ideal would be, in fact, 7 or 8 of each.
And about the «easier to handle» thing, I don't think it's fine to refer to it as a issue. Either 3 or 4 means lot of time to handle the cube. And that's not suppose to be an issue when you decide to build that kind of cube anyway. Also, if you go with a 4/2/1 ratio, it produces more packs, so less frequent handling time. Just saying.
Zetsu's Cube on CubeTutor.com
Zetsu's Ebay MTG Online Store
Zetsu's Poker Draft Method
Another thing you can do is tamper with rarities, giving less playable cards only one or two slots, but letting middle of the road playables have an extra slot or two.
Low-power cube enthusiast!
My 1570 card cube (no longer updated)
My 415 Peasant+ Artifact and Enchantment Cube
Ever-Expanding "Just throw it in" cube.
That's exactly what we do and it's working so well! Depending on set size, we go from 3 to 5 copies of each common. If the set is a small, we have no choice to go bigger. Dark Ascension, for example, has a 6 to 8 ratio for the commons. We do that because we want 36 packs out of each cube set we have. In fact, it's impossible for a small set like DA to generate enough packs with 4xCommon.
Zetsu's Cube on CubeTutor.com
Zetsu's Ebay MTG Online Store
Zetsu's Poker Draft Method
http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcurve/22514
As a side note, I personally would define the # of slots a card has based on archetype and decks it goes in, rather than rarity. For example, I'd put Lightning Weaver in the "common" slot.
The reason I didn't do that for mine is because (depending on how far you go, of course) I didn't want those to be the only archetypes. I erred on the side of "good in most decks, but better in this deck." I like players being able to discover new and interesting interactions.
When I started I did a 3/2/1 mix with some extra cards added to support specific archtypes (extra Burning vengeance sort of things). I have since been cutting cards and am down to what is more of a powered innistrad cube. I have all of the other cards still sleeved, but I started just cutting every last pick from the cube to get cards like favor of the woods out and it eventually powered everything up which I do like. (And it makes shuffling a lot easier.)
Here is a link to my cube on cube tutor: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/18665
I also have an original ravnica cube, which is where I learned singleton is not the way to go for these environments. The cube gets much more playable when you start adding the needed commons and uncommons.
Well, I've played with my cube now a few times, and I must say that every time has been a blast! The last time we had a 12-man draft, and I included a draft-matters card as a 16th card in every pack, along with the normal 10 Commons/3 Uncommons/1 Rare or Mythic/1 Transform card in every pack. The Conspiracy cards definately shake up the draft!
50 basic lands of every type was able to support all 12 players (thank god! Did not relish having to double sleeve more on the fly!).
So far the size hasn't been too unwieldy, with everyone helping to sort out their cards after the draft it went quickly. The longest part was creating the packs at the start, although I got a great tip from another player to use some larger baggies to hold the "packs" to keep them sealed and together.
I will be assembling a Ravnica plane cube at sometime, and I will probably run with a 15th card in the pack being either a gate or a shock-land or the Maze's End as well. I will probably still include gates within the common slots as well, to allow for being able to draft a Maze's End deck.
Now I just have to decide on permanent storage solutions for the cube, being that it, and the Ravnica one, will be extra large (it takes up 2 3-row boxes, nearly full.)
If you have any comments, or notice any mistakes, please let me know.