Magic: the Gathering is a timeless card game for a multiverse of reasons, but among them are the various formats you can choose to play the game in. From competitive 60-card decks you climb the ladder on Magic Arena to the “Beer and Pretzels” laughs of some fun casual Commander games, there pretty much will always be something that can appeal to you (yes, you dear reader!) in the world of Magic. One of the classic formats for the game is known as “Limited” – if you aren’t familiar, this entails making decks from a selected pool of cards created from magic product, typically a form of booster pack. The main ways to play this are Booster Drafts – which involve players passing around boosters and selecting cards from each pack as they’re shared across the table, as well as Sealed – which involves players individually opening packs and keeping the entire pool to create a deck with. Decks are typically made into smaller, 40 card minimum lists and played out among best-of-3 rounds with the rest of your pool effectively acting as a sideboard.
For many players, limited is the pinnacle format in Magic. Every time you play, you get a fresh deck and virtually no two limited events will have the exact same decklists at the table. It also is a great way to express deckbuilding skill as well as learn some of the core mechanics from individual sets. There are a few caveats though; each time you play, you’re required to put a little bit of money on the table to set up a game, as actually playing limited does require sealed Magic product to work properly. Depending on how often you play, this can add up pretty quickly. More importantly though, the limited environment between different sets can vary drastically, with some sets having incredibly fun and diverse formats while others tend to lean harshly towards a few powerful archetypes that can overpower the rest. While you can tailor the sealed products you use to best fit the needs of your playgroup, you’re still restricted to the randomness of what’s actually available in the packs you draft. What if I told you there was a solution to these issues in a fantastic format with endless opportunities…
Introducing: Cube Draft
Cube Draft is a format that has been championed heavily by many prominent members of the community for over a decade, one which many players consider to be some of the best gameplay you can experience in Magic. If you want a more detailed history on the format and some passionate insight from the community (and commentary on a really unique Cube itself), I highly suggest Rhystic Studies’ video on the topic, which you can find here. I’m here to more talk technicalities on the format and how it functions from a gameplay perspective.
Cube’s core gameplay is pretty simple: it’s a limited format with a pool of cards that you can curate yourself. There isn’t a set limit on the amount of cards in a set, amount of duplicates, and even if you need to play it 1v1 or in a multiplayer pod – the choices are endless, but the core idea stays the same. You create a set of cards intended to be drafted like boosters, with every card being pre-sleeved up, shuffled together, and distributed to be “drafted” in pack sized piles. Typically, cubes tend to hover around 360-400 cards, as that means most/all of the set can be drafted by a normal draft pod, making sure every card can be seen at the tables, but this isn’t a hard rule by any means.
The real creativity comes when looking at actually curating your selected pool of cards, as you the creator can decide what you want your draft format to look like. From draft archetypes to color pairings to amount of mana fixing and speed you want available, you can use whatever resources you want to determine the general experience you want to convey when players sit down to draft your cube. Combining the deckbuilding and replay value of limited with the opportunity to handpick the selection of cards players will see can make for a pretty unforgettable play experience, one that keeps many players interested in iterating and tweaking cubes to play time and time again.
So where does that bring us here? In this article series, I’ll be chatting about my own Cube, sharing some of the philosophies and choices I make in regards to selecting the set of cards and how you can use these concepts to assemble your own Cube. It’s not my first rodeo with Cube, but I’m definitely putting more effort and research into this than I have with past Cubes I’ve worked on, so I plan to share the fruits of this labor here as we go through this journey together. That being said, what actually is the Cube we’ll be assembling here? Funny you should ask…
An Introduction to the Ravnica Abridged Cube
If you’ve read some of my writing in the past, you’ll be no stranger to the fact that I absolutely adore Ravnica, both thematically as a plane and mechanically as a set theme. Uniquely defined two color pairings on top of key mono-color pieces to help tie together fringe archetypes have made many of the sets on this plane have a unique flavor that I personally don’t think has been expressed as well outside of these sets. Due to these things, I chose to make this Cube effectively a massive combined Ravnica set, combining the various mechanics of the guilds across the different sets and unifying them under one umbrella archetype, as well as combining some other key pieces to add in a variety of possible strategies you can draft towards across all of the colors available.
The card pool I am choosing to use is, shockingly, every set that Ravnica has been featured as the primary plane in. This boils things down to these options:
“Original” Ravnica Block
- Ravnica: City of Guilds
- Guildpact
- Dissension
Return to Ravnica Block
- Return to Ravnica
- Gatecrash
- Dragon’s Maze
Guilds of Ravnica “Block”
(This wasn’t officially a block, but is often looked at together as it was tied together in a cohesive story arc and card theming)
- Guilds of Ravnica
- Ravnica Allegiance
- War of the Spark
Murders at Karlov Manor
Still a Ravnica block, although this is notably the only set outside of War of the Spark that didn’t have a focus on any of the guild synergies and instead pushed different archetypes.
This is a pretty great set of options, giving us just shy of 2400 cards to select from. I don’t have a fixed size currently, but I’m putting a soft cap at ~400 cards, as I want most of the cards to be seen in a normal draft, but I also want enough flexibility to have more/less players as needed and still have the pool work well. I also want to have enough space for proper manabases and fixing, as many of these set mechanics involve multicolor cards that can have some pretty aggressive casting costs.
While there isn’t a requirement to have your set be singleton, I’ll only be including a single copy of each card in the pool. I think it makes for a much more unique format – both allowing for more cards to be seen in the set as well as providing a more diverse set of options that can have some interesting fringe cases. Rather than just include the most efficient flier 4 times, I can show off some cool cards like Daggerclaw Imp and Courier Hawk, simple designs that can fit into many different archetypes individually while often not being wanted for the same decks.
My goal for this is to promote a unique draft experience, but one that sticks to the normal feelings you’d get when you go to a draft at Friday Night Magic. While the more selective card pool will trim down the “fat” of the set and mean individual cards will be more powerful, the singleton format will mean you have to be choosy in how you actually want to execute play patterns with your decks and how you will want to draft specific types of cards. I think this will make for a slightly higher power pod than a traditional draft, but given some of these sets included aren’t exactly powerhouses of modern Magic, I don’t expect it to be anything close to what I would consider a high power draft. I really want to evoke some of my experiences drafting some of these sets and share them with friends, while having a fresh take to promote unique deckbuilding opportunities and show off some sweet cards that don’t often see the light of day in many formats. While I’m not really intending to let myself pick cards based on nostalgia, I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t partially a love letter to my teenage self, making the “perfect” draft set on one of my favorite planes, and a theme/story that I consider a cornerstone to getting me into this hobby as a whole.
Stay tuned for more articles on the way, in the next one we’ll be talking about mana fixing, color identities, and the role of colorless cards in a set based around multicolor pairings. I’ll see you then!
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