In part 1 of this opinionated article, I will, in a disheartening tone, present two correlated cube design problems: overdesign and lack of variety. I’m confident these problems exist.
In part 2, I will, in a more optimistic tone, theorycraft a cube structure to mitigate these problems.
Part 1: Embrace the Chaos
The dictionary definitions of the terms variance and variety are similar to each other, and the concepts largely intersect. They have very different connotations, though.
Variance is a word negatively associated with “dumb luck trumping skill,” “RNG,” and mulligans to 4. Example of use: “sometimes you just lose to variance.”
Variety is a word positively associated with diverse experiences, the opposite of monotony, novelty. In a sentence: “my cube offers a great variety of strategies”
When an archetype, macro (like aggro) or micro (like reanimator) is not doing well in a cube, often the symptom is that sometimes it goes off and blows out the opponent, but most often it does not draw the right cards at the right time and fizzles. We blame variance for that. Aside: this is a much bigger issue for fast archetypes like the examples mentioned, as they have a smaller window and less opportunity to scry/draw/fetch for its required parts.
In the video “Hypergeometric Hype! Math Makes Magic Better”, Cultic Cube presents us with hypergeometric analysis, a mathematical tool to calculate how many slots are required in a cube to hit a desired threshold chance of drawing at least a certain number of a card group, such as lands or one-drops, after a certain amount of draws.
The generally accepted recipe to fix an inconsistent archetype that is losing because of variance is to add redundancy for the effects it requires. “Add more discard enablers.” “You need at least nine 1-drops to support white weenie.” These quotas enable decks to hit the thresholds to be consistent and be more than likely able to execute their game plan.
This brings the cube closer to the designer’s vision. The archetypes they designed will function well. The interactions they envisioned will happen. The experience will feel polished and carefully curated. Hard numbers will guarantee the games follow the designer’s vision.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cube started as a singleton format. It is still mostly singleton, though our own Jason Waddell demonstrated that the police does not knock on your door if you break the singleton rule. Or perhaps that’s why he moved countries. Hmmm.
“A draft with the best cards in Magic, where no two cards are the same.”
Cube Draft was a breakthrough in Magic: the Gathering. Limited at the time was less popular and not as polished as it is today. It was a format mostly about playing bad creatures, removal, and if you were lucky, a bomb. Casual constructed players who were used to playing crappy constructed decks in lopsided matchups (casual constructed has a lot of 80/20 and 90/10 matchups) saw many advantages in the new experience:
Power maxing (running the best cards available) in 2010 made for a good limited environment, but I don’t believe it makes a good limited environment nowadays anymore. Power creep, especially in threats, has brought to powermax cubes many cards in the following categories:
Planeswalkers. Powermax cubes often run ~40 planeswalkers in a 360 cube. Elspeth, in February 2011, made me realize I did not want to powermax.
Bombs that demand immediate answer. The power of creatures and urgency with which they need to be removed scaled up dramatically, while the best answers are still Counterspell, Lightning Bolt, and Swords to Plowshares. Juzam Djinn was a legitimate cube card at the time, while now Nightmare Shepherd, is considered a “build around synergy card”.
Uninteractive cards. Old Magic design tended to be pretty conscious about threats not being too good, as if games were supposed to be difficult to win. Uninteractive meant… Blastoderm.
Complex, wordy cards. This category largely intersects the planeswalkers category. Complex cards heavily punish casual players for not knowing them by heart, especially aberrations like double-faced planeswalkers.
Though the singleton rule anchored cube at high variety for a long time, over the years the large amounts of new cards printed at a high power level negated it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Consistency is good for a deck’s win rate, and increasing the consistency of your deck is good for you, as a player, since you win and (presumably) get happy. However, increasing consistency of all decks is neutral for everyone’s win rates since Magic is a zero-sum game, and negative for the variety of gameplay. Decks feel more like constructed decks, rather than limited decks. Cards feel commoditized.
I believe the vast majority of people have more fun with more variety. There was a long thread in MTG Salvation, which I can’t find anymore, with the title (from memory) “It could only happen in Cube.” It was full of interesting, unique games, interactions between cards printed many years apart, and corner cases mattering.
That is how the cube experiences I have not curated much often felt. In a memorable game, two players were stuck at 1 life, no board except for lands and one Manabarbs. One player suggested to count the cards in their decks, to see who would mill out first. The other, though, had a Memnite in their deck, so he showed it wasn’t the last card and won.
Even the word “monotone” being equated with “dullness” suggests that one single tone is boring, multiple tones are fun.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some players thrive on competitive environments where they can hone their skills to be the best in that environment. Some groups have this competitive profile, and these players can enjoy cube as an environment to master. However, putting in a tremendous amount of effort to master a cube is the exception, not the rule. Especially when cube draft has become so popular, mastering someone else’s cube seems pointless. That’s the allure of the MTGO Vintage cube - it is THE cube, an actual format.
If you have the unlikely opportunity to design a cube like this for Spike players, variety might not be one of your design goals, but for most groups, it is a worthy one.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even the decrease of variance has one pernicious effect: it is worse for the lower-skilled players, who get beaten by well-oiled machines over and over.
Cube designers obviously tend to be very good at their owns cubes. They imbue their cubes with their own vision of the game, and know what all cards in their cube do, and all the archetypes and how well supported they are, and in which colors, and what are the payoffs, and what are the enablers... The more they tinker with their cube, the more their win rate increases. And in our own egocentric hearts, we believe that we are above-average players and the increased win rate comes from less variance. We then double down on the idea that lowering variance is rewarding skill, and that is a good thing, at the same time we further lower the win rates of the people who are least likely to come back.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carefully curated cubes tend to follow the view of the cube designer. If they believe, for example, that Azorius is a control pair, and Boros is an aggro pair, the cube will inevitably reflect that, as their card choices comprise 100% of the cube.
If they believe aggro needs evasion to beat control, then there won’t be a lot of blocking. If they believe lifegain is a bad archetype, lifegain will not be a viable archetype.
Since these pseudo-constructed decks are designed by the cube designer, players feel like they are playing some version of a deck that was planted there by the designer, hoping it was balanced correctly - which is borderline impossible. They rarely discover cards that go well in a certain deck, because they cube designer designed all decks, and considered, for each single card in the cube, whether it is good in that deck or not.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most affected player by the lack of variety and the designed archetypes is perhaps the cube designer. I found myself being surprised less and less often by the interactions because I had designed them all.
I filled my cube with my own creativity, and left no space for my players’ creativity.
By having a smaller pool of cards, organized into archetypes, I had optimized the decks that used interaction that I predicted, but nerfed the decks that used interactions I did not predict.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Overdesign is one of the biggest perils of cube archetype design. In Riptide Lab, the cubes skewed heavily towards being synergy-based, and it feels like in the latest years, cube design has largely swerved in this direction. That probably comes from the success of archetypes in retail limited, and perhaps we, RipLab, as a community, advanced this vision a little bit, too.
One way to combat overdesign is to maximize the combinatorial possibilities in your micro archetypes, using archetype shapes that maximize variety, like Penta archetypes or Tetra archetypes. Compare a Pair archetype to a Penta archetype:
The best way to counter overdesign in our cubes is to give up control. We must think less about how it all fits together in a nicely crafted environment and embrace the chaos. We must fill a part of our cube with our creativity but leave space for the players to create, too.
This means have a much larger cube, enough that it is again credible that it cannot be a highly curated, perfected environment. Think 1000+ cards. When cards are unlikely to appear, your advantage as a cube designer is reduced since there is less certainty for you about what will show up in the next packs, like it always is for your drafters.
This goes completely against the general consensus about synergy cubes, though. How can you maintain micro archetype density in such a large cube? Wait, are you even supposed to?
Well, letting go of archetypes is a way to give up control and seems like it would create more weak combinations, but lead to the loss of strong ones. Let’s go one level up from cards combinations and think about how archetypes support deck variety.
Macro archetypes like aggro, control, midrange, and tempo are emergent by the design of the game, at certain proportions and choices of threats/answers and mana curves. Finding and maintaining these proportions choices maximizes variety in macro archetypes.
Micro archetypes like reanimator, aristocrats, and spellslinger are a prolific avenue to increase variety of gameplay. Cards having different values in different decks, and combos providing more value than the sums of their parts reward drafters for leaving good stuff local maxima and taking risks to find a deck that is better than the sum of the best parts available. More importantly, micro archetype decks have significantly different gameplay from each other.
Not supporting micro archetypes leads to a purely value cube, and to the loss of a large part of the experience of playing Magic. Worse, retails limited offers that now, and it is expected that a cube would offer it, too.
Part 2 proposes a cube structure to support micro archetypes in a very large cube.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Though not too relevant for this post, another point why cube felt better than retail limited circa 2010: since all cards in cube were good, the power band was much narrower in comparison with retail limited, which had great effects: drafting badly did not mean your night was miserable, as even a trainwrecked draft had access to good cards; and variance had a smaller effect, as bombs were easier to remove, or could be reliably met with other bombs. This is where the idea of “narrow power band” started. It was definitely good to be narrower than retail limited at the time, but we might have gone too far trying to hit flat power levels. Wider power bands have some advantages such as signaling, excitement, and variety.
In part 2, I will, in a more optimistic tone, theorycraft a cube structure to mitigate these problems.
Part 1: Embrace the Chaos
The dictionary definitions of the terms variance and variety are similar to each other, and the concepts largely intersect. They have very different connotations, though.
Variance is a word negatively associated with “dumb luck trumping skill,” “RNG,” and mulligans to 4. Example of use: “sometimes you just lose to variance.”
Variety is a word positively associated with diverse experiences, the opposite of monotony, novelty. In a sentence: “my cube offers a great variety of strategies”
When an archetype, macro (like aggro) or micro (like reanimator) is not doing well in a cube, often the symptom is that sometimes it goes off and blows out the opponent, but most often it does not draw the right cards at the right time and fizzles. We blame variance for that. Aside: this is a much bigger issue for fast archetypes like the examples mentioned, as they have a smaller window and less opportunity to scry/draw/fetch for its required parts.
In the video “Hypergeometric Hype! Math Makes Magic Better”, Cultic Cube presents us with hypergeometric analysis, a mathematical tool to calculate how many slots are required in a cube to hit a desired threshold chance of drawing at least a certain number of a card group, such as lands or one-drops, after a certain amount of draws.
The generally accepted recipe to fix an inconsistent archetype that is losing because of variance is to add redundancy for the effects it requires. “Add more discard enablers.” “You need at least nine 1-drops to support white weenie.” These quotas enable decks to hit the thresholds to be consistent and be more than likely able to execute their game plan.
This brings the cube closer to the designer’s vision. The archetypes they designed will function well. The interactions they envisioned will happen. The experience will feel polished and carefully curated. Hard numbers will guarantee the games follow the designer’s vision.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cube started as a singleton format. It is still mostly singleton, though our own Jason Waddell demonstrated that the police does not knock on your door if you break the singleton rule. Or perhaps that’s why he moved countries. Hmmm.
“A draft with the best cards in Magic, where no two cards are the same.”
Cube Draft was a breakthrough in Magic: the Gathering. Limited at the time was less popular and not as polished as it is today. It was a format mostly about playing bad creatures, removal, and if you were lucky, a bomb. Casual constructed players who were used to playing crappy constructed decks in lopsided matchups (casual constructed has a lot of 80/20 and 90/10 matchups) saw many advantages in the new experience:
- Zero cost: cube drafts were free!
- Limited: many people didn’t play much limited for the lack of an LGS, or money. The zero marginal cost of cube allowed them to play limited, which is a completely different experience than constructed, and to many, more compelling.
- Good Limited: booster draft at the time was not so fun. While a handful of draft environments like full Ravnica block were well-regarded, most retail limited environments had lots of unplayable cards and did not support macro or micro archetypes well. It was mostly playing (not-so-)goodstuff. It turned out that the most powerful Magic cards at the time made for a pretty good limited environment. [1]
- Variety: each Cube Draft, everyone got a different deck. We just shuffled good cards and made packs, designed archetypes were uncommon - reanimator being a notable exception. There weren’t enough similar cards at a high power level to be redundant and consistent. Each deck was actually different, and itself inconsistent. Since there was only one of each card, draws varied a lot and each game was a different story.
Power maxing (running the best cards available) in 2010 made for a good limited environment, but I don’t believe it makes a good limited environment nowadays anymore. Power creep, especially in threats, has brought to powermax cubes many cards in the following categories:
Planeswalkers. Powermax cubes often run ~40 planeswalkers in a 360 cube. Elspeth, in February 2011, made me realize I did not want to powermax.
Bombs that demand immediate answer. The power of creatures and urgency with which they need to be removed scaled up dramatically, while the best answers are still Counterspell, Lightning Bolt, and Swords to Plowshares. Juzam Djinn was a legitimate cube card at the time, while now Nightmare Shepherd, is considered a “build around synergy card”.
Uninteractive cards. Old Magic design tended to be pretty conscious about threats not being too good, as if games were supposed to be difficult to win. Uninteractive meant… Blastoderm.
Complex, wordy cards. This category largely intersects the planeswalkers category. Complex cards heavily punish casual players for not knowing them by heart, especially aberrations like double-faced planeswalkers.
Though the singleton rule anchored cube at high variety for a long time, over the years the large amounts of new cards printed at a high power level negated it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Consistency is good for a deck’s win rate, and increasing the consistency of your deck is good for you, as a player, since you win and (presumably) get happy. However, increasing consistency of all decks is neutral for everyone’s win rates since Magic is a zero-sum game, and negative for the variety of gameplay. Decks feel more like constructed decks, rather than limited decks. Cards feel commoditized.
I believe the vast majority of people have more fun with more variety. There was a long thread in MTG Salvation, which I can’t find anymore, with the title (from memory) “It could only happen in Cube.” It was full of interesting, unique games, interactions between cards printed many years apart, and corner cases mattering.
That is how the cube experiences I have not curated much often felt. In a memorable game, two players were stuck at 1 life, no board except for lands and one Manabarbs. One player suggested to count the cards in their decks, to see who would mill out first. The other, though, had a Memnite in their deck, so he showed it wasn’t the last card and won.
Even the word “monotone” being equated with “dullness” suggests that one single tone is boring, multiple tones are fun.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some players thrive on competitive environments where they can hone their skills to be the best in that environment. Some groups have this competitive profile, and these players can enjoy cube as an environment to master. However, putting in a tremendous amount of effort to master a cube is the exception, not the rule. Especially when cube draft has become so popular, mastering someone else’s cube seems pointless. That’s the allure of the MTGO Vintage cube - it is THE cube, an actual format.
If you have the unlikely opportunity to design a cube like this for Spike players, variety might not be one of your design goals, but for most groups, it is a worthy one.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even the decrease of variance has one pernicious effect: it is worse for the lower-skilled players, who get beaten by well-oiled machines over and over.
Cube designers obviously tend to be very good at their owns cubes. They imbue their cubes with their own vision of the game, and know what all cards in their cube do, and all the archetypes and how well supported they are, and in which colors, and what are the payoffs, and what are the enablers... The more they tinker with their cube, the more their win rate increases. And in our own egocentric hearts, we believe that we are above-average players and the increased win rate comes from less variance. We then double down on the idea that lowering variance is rewarding skill, and that is a good thing, at the same time we further lower the win rates of the people who are least likely to come back.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carefully curated cubes tend to follow the view of the cube designer. If they believe, for example, that Azorius is a control pair, and Boros is an aggro pair, the cube will inevitably reflect that, as their card choices comprise 100% of the cube.
If they believe aggro needs evasion to beat control, then there won’t be a lot of blocking. If they believe lifegain is a bad archetype, lifegain will not be a viable archetype.
Since these pseudo-constructed decks are designed by the cube designer, players feel like they are playing some version of a deck that was planted there by the designer, hoping it was balanced correctly - which is borderline impossible. They rarely discover cards that go well in a certain deck, because they cube designer designed all decks, and considered, for each single card in the cube, whether it is good in that deck or not.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most affected player by the lack of variety and the designed archetypes is perhaps the cube designer. I found myself being surprised less and less often by the interactions because I had designed them all.
I filled my cube with my own creativity, and left no space for my players’ creativity.
By having a smaller pool of cards, organized into archetypes, I had optimized the decks that used interaction that I predicted, but nerfed the decks that used interactions I did not predict.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Overdesign is one of the biggest perils of cube archetype design. In Riptide Lab, the cubes skewed heavily towards being synergy-based, and it feels like in the latest years, cube design has largely swerved in this direction. That probably comes from the success of archetypes in retail limited, and perhaps we, RipLab, as a community, advanced this vision a little bit, too.
One way to combat overdesign is to maximize the combinatorial possibilities in your micro archetypes, using archetype shapes that maximize variety, like Penta archetypes or Tetra archetypes. Compare a Pair archetype to a Penta archetype:
- With 20 slots, 10 in each of two colors you have 1 possible color combination in that archetype. Assuming 10 cards are enablers that combo with any 10 payoffs, there are 100 enabler-payoff combinations, 5 per slot.
- With 50 slots, 10 in each of the five colors, you have 10 possible two-color combinations in that archetype. Assuming 25 cards are enablers that combo with any 25 payoffs, there are 625 enabler-payoff combinations, 12.5 per slot.
The best way to counter overdesign in our cubes is to give up control. We must think less about how it all fits together in a nicely crafted environment and embrace the chaos. We must fill a part of our cube with our creativity but leave space for the players to create, too.
This means have a much larger cube, enough that it is again credible that it cannot be a highly curated, perfected environment. Think 1000+ cards. When cards are unlikely to appear, your advantage as a cube designer is reduced since there is less certainty for you about what will show up in the next packs, like it always is for your drafters.
This goes completely against the general consensus about synergy cubes, though. How can you maintain micro archetype density in such a large cube? Wait, are you even supposed to?
Well, letting go of archetypes is a way to give up control and seems like it would create more weak combinations, but lead to the loss of strong ones. Let’s go one level up from cards combinations and think about how archetypes support deck variety.
Macro archetypes like aggro, control, midrange, and tempo are emergent by the design of the game, at certain proportions and choices of threats/answers and mana curves. Finding and maintaining these proportions choices maximizes variety in macro archetypes.
Micro archetypes like reanimator, aristocrats, and spellslinger are a prolific avenue to increase variety of gameplay. Cards having different values in different decks, and combos providing more value than the sums of their parts reward drafters for leaving good stuff local maxima and taking risks to find a deck that is better than the sum of the best parts available. More importantly, micro archetype decks have significantly different gameplay from each other.
Not supporting micro archetypes leads to a purely value cube, and to the loss of a large part of the experience of playing Magic. Worse, retails limited offers that now, and it is expected that a cube would offer it, too.
Part 2 proposes a cube structure to support micro archetypes in a very large cube.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Though not too relevant for this post, another point why cube felt better than retail limited circa 2010: since all cards in cube were good, the power band was much narrower in comparison with retail limited, which had great effects: drafting badly did not mean your night was miserable, as even a trainwrecked draft had access to good cards; and variance had a smaller effect, as bombs were easier to remove, or could be reliably met with other bombs. This is where the idea of “narrow power band” started. It was definitely good to be narrower than retail limited at the time, but we might have gone too far trying to hit flat power levels. Wider power bands have some advantages such as signaling, excitement, and variety.
