Some further thoughts on gameplay
I'm very proud of the way that this cube plays in a way I'm not sure that I've felt about any other project. I made a lot of big bets during the design process that all of these like stacked gimmicks, the no deckbuilding, the tight curation of numbers on cards, the nonred cards with red modes, would all come together and form a coherent and exciting draft format and I was shocked that it all just kinda worked on the first draft and I've only had to make minimal changes since then.
I've described the games in this cube as "slow until suddenly they aren't and someone dies". Games are "long" in that they take a lot of turns to finish, but since so many of the cards are very simple, the turns go by quickly and games generally don't take up a bunch of clock time.
The cube is all about choosing between 2-3 similar but appreciably different options every turn, which is my favorite thing to do in card games. Games begin as absolute bare bones fundamentals magic, chipping away at each other with dinguses and making classic magic combat decisions. Do you attack your Pikers into their Myrs? Do you trade your
Goblin Tinkerer for one of their rocks or save it to beat
Obelisk of Alara? Do you spend a Shock as removal now or try to go face later? Then the late game comes around and suddenly players are dropping insane haymakers that completely dominate the board, life totals get tight, and then you're dead from 2 Shocks and a Hammer. There's a really exciting ramp up from the straightforward small ball early game and the wild swings that happen once someone casts
Aggressive Mining or reanimates their
Greater Sandwurm.
The thing that I think is most successful about this cube, and the thing I would most want other folks to take away from this project and apply to their own designs, is the absolute devotion to controlling the numbers that get to be on the cards. I wanted this to be a cube about the numbers 1, 2, and 3, and making the distinction between them feel meaningful. Not allowing red creatures to have arbitrary big stats and aggressively curating the list around this means that players are always forced into making tight decisions. If you want to kill a thing with 4 toughness and your deck can't cast
Expunge, you have to make risky plays in order to make progress. How can I get them to block this Piker with their
Barkhide Mauler so I can finish it off with Shock? When is that 1-for-2 worth it? Do I want to trade my
Mogg Fanatic for one of their 1 drop shitters so I can get in with my Pikers, or is it better to save it for later? And on and on and on. These sort of heuristic-driven gambly decisions are the type of thing I really love about this game and Goblin Game distills that gameplay down to its bare essentials. Every game I play in this cube I'm like hunched over the table staring the board down completely locked in and trying not to give too much away. It's fucking awesome.
One of my many motivations for this project was an ongoing frustration with stat creep in magic. I feel like WotC has just completely lost the plot on what numbers can go on cheap cards to the point that it feels like it just doesn't even matter anymore. Sure man here's a 2 mana 3/3 for 1G and it's not even that good. Who gives a shit. We often joke about how miserably shitty old creatures were, but I think people lose sight of the fact that they used to tightly control the stats on cards for a reason. They were trying to keep the game from spiraling out of control into oops my 1 drop is also a late game threat that fucking kills you. When the game becomes about that I think you lose a lot of clarity in the baits and bluffs that make combat in this game so fun. I would really encourage folks to take a look at their cube lists and ask themselves what they think a reasonable number is to put on a card of a given mana cost, and see how many cards just arbitrarily violate that constraint. I think the on-the-board gameplay of a cube can benefit immensely from being a complete freak about the numbers in the bottom right and top right corners of the cards. Of course, taking a gamble on calculating risks and playing the odds is thrilling in card games—much like checking out a
betmatch casino promo code when looking for an extra rush outside of the match.
