Black Lagoon
Hi everyone, I’ve been slacking in regards to maintaining my cube, but hoping by keeping a blog with musings and updates, I’ll be holding myself more accountable in terms of taking a more active role in playing and thinking about my cube (as of the date of the initial posting, I have not updated since All Will Be One)
Inspiration:
At a friend’s house, as I’m looking through some of his belongings I find a sealed War of the Spark box.
Me: Woah, you still have one of these?
Friend: Yeah, I love this set, I kept a box to play sealed during a special occasion.
Me: That was a fun sealed format, one of my favorite prereleases.
Friend: If only there was a way to play limited without having to use up this box…
Me: wait a second…
Overview:
High planeswalker density cube with an emphasis on playing decks with multiple colors. Because of the high planeswalker quantity, games tend to be grindy and value-oriented. Complexity tends to come from deciding which planeswalker ability to activate, and which target to attack.
Design Goals & Thought Process:
Initially, I was going to build a War of the Spark set cube, but afterseeing the cost of obtaining the cards thinking about it, I decided to build a cube inspired by War of the Spark (specifically the sealed experience of opening six planeswalkers and assembling a team to do battle with your opponent’s superfriends). I wanted to emphasize the parts I liked while attempting to fix parts I didn’t like about the set. The two main issues I had with WAR were:
Opening six planeswalkers while not being able to play them due to not having enough fixing.
My first initial reaction was to add a good amount of mana fixing and a high number of gold cards to encourage multi-colored decks. As I consumed more media about cube design, one thing I often saw was to minimize the number of gold cards. Because this was my first time building a cube, I tried to follow the advice of more experienced cube designers and builders, and I had a hard time reconciling the two positions (how do I encourage people to play multi-colored decks so they can play all the planeswalkers, while minimizing the amount of gold cards). Eventually, I came to the realization that I’m over thinking it and that trying to minimize the number of gold cards was not compatible with the vision I had. The heavy gold card quantity also has the added benefit of making draft somewhat more straightforward for some of the people who play the cube (EDH players who don’t play limited and have little experience in sealed and draft); pick lands and pick cards in your colors and just play a 60+ card deck that will still be functional.
Opening planeswalkers and feeling disappointed due to how underwhelming they felt.
War of the Spark was out during a time when I still played at LGSes often and was lucky enough to have access to stores that specifically did sealed events (nothing against draft, I just liked the sealed experience for this set more). One of the disappointing things would be opening the planeswalkers and feeling underwhelmed. I wanted the planeswalkers in the cube to be ones that sparked (heh) excitement when seeing them in the pack, but avoiding the ones that would end up being too powerful and centralizing (e.g. Nissa, Who Shakes the World).
Because War of the Spark exists, I was able to use some of its archetypes as a baseline, specifically proliferate, aristocrats, spellslinging, and ramp. Spellslinging ended up combining with drawing cards as an archetype, which led to cycling being added to the cube. Aristocrats ended up leading to token generation being added as an archetype. Ramp leads itself to supporting a lands strategy, which also helps encourage the multi-colored playstyle theme. I added some WUBRG cards to support the 5-color goodstuff theme.
Games tend to be swingy and there are a good number of bombs. I’d rather have memorable games and allow people to remember certain plays and decks they had a good time playing with the group than a flatter power band (within reason; if cards end up becoming a problem I’ll replace them). This is a result of the average person who plays my cube tend to play MTG as more of a social experience instead of one to try to win.
540 cards is the maximum amount of cards I’m willing to allow, but I’m trying to avoid increasing the cube size. 450 was the initial size, but I bumped it up to 510 to try to fit more cards and its current size seems to be near the ideal.
Silver-border cards are fair game, but no custom cards (nothing against them, but knowing me half the cube would end up being custom cards).
Archetypes:
The color distribution isn’t even but some general themes are as below:
Bant (+black): Proliferate
Jund/WURG: Lands
Grixis: Bolas tribal/Grixis control
Abzan: Token Generation
Jeskai: Drawing cards/cycling
Mardu: Aristocrats
Gruul: Midrange beatdown
Izzet: Spellslinging
Simic: +1/+1 counters
5c
Superfriends is present in all color combinations.
Current thoughts as of initial posting (2023/09/13):
Overall, in-person reception has been positive, people have told me they had a good time playing the cube (hopefully they’re not just saying it to be nice, but because they actually had fun!). I’m happy with the play patterns and playstyles and the current power level of the cube. I always tell other people that my best MTG investment was building a cube.
The most common way I’ve played the cube is 1v1 Winston draft as it’s easier to find one other person with whom to play than a whole group.
Decks tend to be 3-4 colors. I tried to add drawbacks to playing multicolored decks by making the lands enter tapped or cost life, but by having a heavy multicolored environment, green ends up being the best color (anecdotally). Luckily, limited tends to be self-correcting (anecdotally), and sometimes when everyone tries to draft green, the person who ends up winning the pod went 4c sans-green. I still think green needs to be tuned down and I’m wondering if the way to do that would be by requiring green cards to have stricter mana requirements (double/triple green to avoid having them splashed in all decks).
I initially thought aggro didn’t exist in the cube, but that was because of my preconceptions of what an aggro deck was (in my mind, typically 1-2 cmc cards). I thought that the fastest decks were some type of mid-range, but after a few drafts realized aggro did exist, albeit with a higher cmc (2-4 cmc cards). Slower decks can get overwhelmed by fast decks.
Cube link:
https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/1mw65
Thanks for reading, and let me know whatever thoughts you have!
Hi everyone, I’ve been slacking in regards to maintaining my cube, but hoping by keeping a blog with musings and updates, I’ll be holding myself more accountable in terms of taking a more active role in playing and thinking about my cube (as of the date of the initial posting, I have not updated since All Will Be One)
Inspiration:
At a friend’s house, as I’m looking through some of his belongings I find a sealed War of the Spark box.
Me: Woah, you still have one of these?
Friend: Yeah, I love this set, I kept a box to play sealed during a special occasion.
Me: That was a fun sealed format, one of my favorite prereleases.
Friend: If only there was a way to play limited without having to use up this box…
Me: wait a second…
Overview:
High planeswalker density cube with an emphasis on playing decks with multiple colors. Because of the high planeswalker quantity, games tend to be grindy and value-oriented. Complexity tends to come from deciding which planeswalker ability to activate, and which target to attack.
Design Goals & Thought Process:
Initially, I was going to build a War of the Spark set cube, but after
Opening six planeswalkers while not being able to play them due to not having enough fixing.
My first initial reaction was to add a good amount of mana fixing and a high number of gold cards to encourage multi-colored decks. As I consumed more media about cube design, one thing I often saw was to minimize the number of gold cards. Because this was my first time building a cube, I tried to follow the advice of more experienced cube designers and builders, and I had a hard time reconciling the two positions (how do I encourage people to play multi-colored decks so they can play all the planeswalkers, while minimizing the amount of gold cards). Eventually, I came to the realization that I’m over thinking it and that trying to minimize the number of gold cards was not compatible with the vision I had. The heavy gold card quantity also has the added benefit of making draft somewhat more straightforward for some of the people who play the cube (EDH players who don’t play limited and have little experience in sealed and draft); pick lands and pick cards in your colors and just play a 60+ card deck that will still be functional.
Opening planeswalkers and feeling disappointed due to how underwhelming they felt.
War of the Spark was out during a time when I still played at LGSes often and was lucky enough to have access to stores that specifically did sealed events (nothing against draft, I just liked the sealed experience for this set more). One of the disappointing things would be opening the planeswalkers and feeling underwhelmed. I wanted the planeswalkers in the cube to be ones that sparked (heh) excitement when seeing them in the pack, but avoiding the ones that would end up being too powerful and centralizing (e.g. Nissa, Who Shakes the World).
Because War of the Spark exists, I was able to use some of its archetypes as a baseline, specifically proliferate, aristocrats, spellslinging, and ramp. Spellslinging ended up combining with drawing cards as an archetype, which led to cycling being added to the cube. Aristocrats ended up leading to token generation being added as an archetype. Ramp leads itself to supporting a lands strategy, which also helps encourage the multi-colored playstyle theme. I added some WUBRG cards to support the 5-color goodstuff theme.
Games tend to be swingy and there are a good number of bombs. I’d rather have memorable games and allow people to remember certain plays and decks they had a good time playing with the group than a flatter power band (within reason; if cards end up becoming a problem I’ll replace them). This is a result of the average person who plays my cube tend to play MTG as more of a social experience instead of one to try to win.
540 cards is the maximum amount of cards I’m willing to allow, but I’m trying to avoid increasing the cube size. 450 was the initial size, but I bumped it up to 510 to try to fit more cards and its current size seems to be near the ideal.
Silver-border cards are fair game, but no custom cards (nothing against them, but knowing me half the cube would end up being custom cards).
Archetypes:
The color distribution isn’t even but some general themes are as below:
Bant (+black): Proliferate
Jund/WURG: Lands
Grixis: Bolas tribal/Grixis control
Abzan: Token Generation
Jeskai: Drawing cards/cycling
Mardu: Aristocrats
Gruul: Midrange beatdown
Izzet: Spellslinging
Simic: +1/+1 counters
5c
Superfriends is present in all color combinations.
Current thoughts as of initial posting (2023/09/13):
Overall, in-person reception has been positive, people have told me they had a good time playing the cube (hopefully they’re not just saying it to be nice, but because they actually had fun!). I’m happy with the play patterns and playstyles and the current power level of the cube. I always tell other people that my best MTG investment was building a cube.
The most common way I’ve played the cube is 1v1 Winston draft as it’s easier to find one other person with whom to play than a whole group.
Decks tend to be 3-4 colors. I tried to add drawbacks to playing multicolored decks by making the lands enter tapped or cost life, but by having a heavy multicolored environment, green ends up being the best color (anecdotally). Luckily, limited tends to be self-correcting (anecdotally), and sometimes when everyone tries to draft green, the person who ends up winning the pod went 4c sans-green. I still think green needs to be tuned down and I’m wondering if the way to do that would be by requiring green cards to have stricter mana requirements (double/triple green to avoid having them splashed in all decks).
I initially thought aggro didn’t exist in the cube, but that was because of my preconceptions of what an aggro deck was (in my mind, typically 1-2 cmc cards). I thought that the fastest decks were some type of mid-range, but after a few drafts realized aggro did exist, albeit with a higher cmc (2-4 cmc cards). Slower decks can get overwhelmed by fast decks.
Cube link:
https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/1mw65
Thanks for reading, and let me know whatever thoughts you have!
